Monkey wrenches

Just as we take up the topic of (re-) wilding in Environmental Ethics, it's reported that the founder of the Rewilding Institute has died.

David Foreman, who as the co-founder of the environmental group Earth First! urged his followers to sabotage bulldozers, slash logging-truck tires and topple high-voltage power lines, earning him a reputation as a visionary, a rabble-rouser, a prankster and, even among some fellow activists, a domestic terrorist, died on Sept. 19 at his home in Albuquerque. He was 75...

[Earth First!'s] members drew inspiration from the writer Edward Abbey, whose 1975 novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” depicts a group of eco-warriors who attack increasingly grandiose targets — including the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona — in the name of the environment... Earth First! and Mr. Foreman were not just more strident than the mainstream. They advocated a different philosophy, known as deep ecology, which holds that nature has inherent value, not just in its utility to people. Their vision included returning vast swaths of land to nature, ripping out any trace of human intervention.

Coincidentally, I heard myself in class last time recalling (not endorsing) Edward Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang shenanigans, and its "incendiary call to protect the American wilderness" at all costs, legal or not. “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving. That's simple, right?”

It's too simple. Earth First! is too simple, and humanity vs. nature is wrongheaded. Like it or not, we're part of it. We have to find a way to own and inhabit that identity, and not become pro- (really anti-) natural self-loathing humans. We have to hang on to our cosmopolitan pedigree, "starstuff contemplating the stars" etc. That's how we'll get back to the garden, by remembering where we came from.

David Foreman probably wouldn't have appreciated Paul Hawken's approach to regenerative ecology. His obituary reports that he called himself "a redneck for the environment" and resented "the arrival of a new, younger cohort of activists who wanted to inject social justice issues into Earth First!’s environmentalism." 

But his legacy has been constructive, in spite of himself. 

After his decade with Earth First!, Mr. Foreman and several of his colleagues created a new organization, the Wildlands Network, which called on governments and nonprofit organizations to buy up large chunks of land and return it to its natural state. He later created the Rewilding Institute to develop policy ideas to realize that vision.

Rewilding our world is one of the most constructive things we can do for the future. No monkey wrench required. 

(Re-)Wilding

Well that was fun yesterday in Environmental Ethics, heading out again into the shade and shadow of Peck Hall and the Walnut Grove to talk about trees and seaforestation. "The seas can turn carbon into forests at a rate exceeding that of the lushest parts of the Amazon," if (as Abby reported) industrial agriculture doesn't deplete the kelp forests first. "It would take an enormous, civilization-defining effort to achieve" the sea forest transformation we need, but "it is an alluring vision"...  

So is this, and a mesmerizing sound as well:  

(Thanks, Ed.)

This arboreal distancing, crown shyness, canopy disengagement, whatever you want to call it, sure looks like a form of cooperative and inter-communicative natural intelligence. A civilized people will not ignore, discount, or plunder it. Are we smart enough to respect its wildness?

And that's our next topic. Wilding.

Whatever that song meant, for humans and the planet generally it means getting and staying out of the way of nature's own capacity for restoration and preservation. Thoreau said it well:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society... westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon... The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind... Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him... Walking (1862)

The point is not to reject civilization but to naturalize it, not to lose intimacy with our natural inheritance and identity or to civilize the nature out of us and thus imperil not only our own form of life but life on earth as such. Individuals can imagine a sharp distinction between nature and culture, between the wild and civilization. But "from the perspective of the living world" the boundaries are blurry. Paul Hawken says it well too:

Wildness grows in the cracks of sidewalks. The human body is suffused with a vast system of microbiota, known and unknown organisms that outnumber our human cells. You could say that we are mostly bactreria learning to be human. Each of us is a culture... [we] exchange microbes and create a web of interconnectedness said to harmonize interactions with our family and the environment.

But in aggregate we've not been harmonizing very well. Do they still introduce the literary arts to grade-schoolers by asserting the dramatic appeal of stories that feature "man against nature"? That's dissonant in the extreme. We've got to restore the balance, or as the growing re-wilding movement has it, to "bring together Indigenous peoples, local communities, influential leaders, nongovernmental organizations, governments, companies and the public to protect and rewild" at great scale and speed." Can we do it?

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, as with seaforestation and many other initiatives we'll be discussing, it's a vision "worth trying our hardest to achieve."

Trees!

We're talking trees in Environmental Ethics today. One of my favorite authors, Richard Powers, has made himself an authority on the subject by writing the excellent 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory. We're treated to an excerpt, at the end of Paul Hawken's "Forests" chapter in Regeneration.

The title is a clever play on the botanical and literary dimensions of the word. "An overstory," says our verbose verbal authority Merriam, "is the top foliage from multiple trees that combine to create an overhang or canopy under which people can walk or sit."  

And an overstory is a fable, or complex of connected fables, intended to create an understanding of one's place in a larger narrative. “The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” 

Philosophers generally hesitate to go all in on that concession, holding out for more receptive listeners and (if we're very lucky) readers willing to follow the argument and even sometimes let it upend treasured convictions. But it's generally true, I think we've observed especially lately, that opposing arguments tend to amplify rather than deconstruct partisan intransigence.

So it's wonderful that Powers and others (including KSR, next on our reading list) have created such a fine and growing body of work in the category known as cli-fi. Time before last this course was focused on that genre, maybe it'll be time to do it again in 2024.

Barbara Kingsolver, former working biologist, is one of the masters of clif-fi with titles like Flight Behavior and Unsheltered. Of The Overstory she said:

Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their livelihoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their children. They breathe, eat and have sex. They give gifts, communicate, learn, remember and record the important events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees — to name one example — with rapid response networks to alert others to a threatening intruder. They manage their resources in bank accounts, using past market trends to predict future needs. They mine and farm the land, and sometimes move their families across great distances for better opportunities. Some of this might take centuries, but for a creature with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must surely have a different feel about it.

And for all that, trees are things to us, good for tables, floors and ceiling beams: As much as we might admire them, we’re still happy to walk on their hearts. It may register as a shock, then, that trees have lives so much like our own. All the behaviors described above have been studied and documented by scientists who carefully avoid the word “behavior” and other anthropomorphic language, lest they be accused of having emotional attachments to their subjects.

The novelist suffers no such injunction, but most of them don’t know beans about botany. Richard Powers is the exception, and his monumental novel “The Overstory” accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.

And then we're introduced to

an odd little girl who loves trees more than she loves most people and grows up to be a scientist. As Dr. Pat Westerford she spends years alone in forests doing her research, initially mocked by her peers but eventually celebrated for an astounding (and actually real) discovery: A forest’s trees are all communicating, all the time, via a nuanced chemical language transmitted from root to root.

And that's where our excerpt comes in. Dr. Westerford is based on a real person, Suzanne Simard, who told The Long Now Foundation and TED that the forests are abuzz with their own kind of talk whether anyone's there to hear it or not, that "trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support." They're nature's true Internet.

 

Another of my favorite authors, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, tried his hand at fiction and mostly avoided talking about it (Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance, 2017) when he sat down with Powers in California. But they had a great conversation that echoes resonantly for us Wendell Berry fans, especially when they distinguish commodity-driven culture from a community-based state of mind. 

 

Kingsolver is right, The Overstory "is a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children." 

Renkl is right, such masterfully crafted fiction is "a lie that teaches us the truth."

All we need now is a new generation of readers who'll value and insist on the truth. And who'll vote and act on it.

 

Additional reading recommendation: You'll want to pick up Bewilderment next, a story about life in the universe and especially its future on earth... and about a brilliant little boy who

loved the library. He loved putting books on hold online and having them waiting, bundled up with his name, when he came for them. He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

We really do need more like him. 

Uncommon readers

 Margaret Renkl is right, there is great joy in finding fellow bibliophiles with whom to share your enthusiasm for books. 

Flip-side of that, I keep discovering to my predictable disappointment, is the great sadness in failing to find readers among one's students. I don't just mean the students who don't read the assignments before class (or maybe ever, judging from some of their exam scores). I mean students who love to receive reading recommendations, to hear about books they now can't wait to read, who understand 

what great writing has always done for readers. It can transport us and delight us, yes, but it can also open our hearts. “Books are not about passing the time”... “They’re about other lives. Other worlds.” The only real way to walk in another person’s shoes is to read another’s person’s story.

But I'll keep making those classroom recommendations, looking for signs of cultural as well as literal literacy among Gen Z (as I did with their predecessors). I really think our future depends on it.

 

 

“Great fiction is a lie that teaches us the truth. Reading history is how we keep from repeating the past…reading transforms the reader.” And as Mr. Twain said, those who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot. https://t.co/OInkgxRho4

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 26, 2022

Hands off

 Much ink and many electrons have been spilled, trying to pinpoint just what it means to be a pluralist in philosophy. The Philosophical Dictionary says it's 

Belief that reality ultimately includes many different kinds of things. Thus, in ethics, the supposition that there are many independent sources of value and, in political life, acceptance of a multiplicity of groups with competing interests. Epistemological pluralism is a common feature in postmodernist thought.

Recommended Reading: Andrew L. Blais, On the Plurality of Actual Worlds (Massachusetts, 1997); John Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy: Changing the Subject (Cornell, 2000); Michael P. Lynch, Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (MIT, 1998); Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Clarendon, 1995); Byeong-Uk Yi, Understanding the Many (Routledge, 2002); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic, 1984); and Philosophy and Pluralism, ed. by David Archard (Cambridge, 1996). Also see IEP, EB, P. J. McGrath, and ISM.

SEP distinguishes logical, scientific, value, religious, and other pluralisms at great length.

Some old Vandy friends even say pragmatists can't be pluralists (depending of course on how we define and analyze our 'isms... and depending, I think, on who we're talking to).

My old Vandy mentor said pragmatists should be stoics, and vice versa. So by my reckoning we can throw stoic pluralism into the hopper too.

I try not to lay all that on my undergrads. I just refer them to WJ:

"Ethically the pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co',,," --The Essence of Humanism

For me, the conclusion of "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" sums it up nicely. Pluralism

absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field. 

 

“Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.” —On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 23, 2022

Pedal on

The biennial Holocaust Conference at our school, returning after the pandemic interruption, traditionally has been held in the big ballroom (The Tennessee Room) in our building. That's across the hall from my classrooms. It commences this morning, and I'd been looking forward to slipping over and catching some of it. Alas, they've moved to the newer bigger ballroom in the Student Union, on the other side of campus. Hope they plan to record it. 

I haven't yet looked at Ken Burns' new Holocaust documentary. I will. There are crucial lessons to learn about a largely unacknowledged stain on American history and "the tragic human consequences of public indifference."

Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge...

Public indifference, walled exclusion, and human sacrifice: old stories we dare not ignore or forget. 

In CoPhi we'll talk Spinoza and other things. Timely topic, considering the indifference of so many of his peers to the injustice of his exclusion and ex-communication. 

I've been on a letters kick, as noted yesterday. (Letters of Note is terrific, makes me long for the age of thoughtful and literary correspondence that the Internet has probably guaranteed will never return.) So it's irresistible to take a look at the famous Einstein-Spinoza letter that got so much attention a few years ago.

Einstein: “For me the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples. As far as my experience goes, they are in fact no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot perceive anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Spinoza scholar Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

“Einstein often uses the word God — ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who teaches philosophy and wrote “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” said...“A lot of physicists do this. It misleads people into thinking they’re theists, they believe in God. It’s a metaphorical way of talking about absolute truth. Einstein used it metaphorically and playfully.”

She said he had been religious when he was a child but “lost his religion and science took over.”

“Every time he was asked if he believe in God, he answered cagily: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god,’” she said, referring to Baruch Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch thinker who drew from Jewish religion and history. “If you say ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god,’ that’s already saying you don’t believe in what most people believe who believe in God believe. You believe the laws of nature are complete in themselves and contain all the answers.”

As Walter Isaacson recounts in Einstein: His Life and Universe, 

everyone from clerics to schoolchildren quizzed Einstein about his religious views. A New York rabbi sent a telegram demanding, “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.” Einstein answered, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

Right. Our fate and doings are our concern.

In Environmental Ethics today, we take up Paul Hawken's Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. 

Is that realistic? Well, it's imperative that we undertake steps now to deconstruct the "existential crisis" (in scare quotes just because so many are complaining about that phrase as suddenly cliche, not because we aren't in one) that will effectively end us if we don't move resolutely on multiple fronts to break our dependence on fossil fuels and stop spewing greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. So it's not realistic to aim for anything less.

Jane Goodall offers a fine foreword, calling for the harmonious integration of "head and heart" to "attain our true human potential." (Note the contrast to Wendell's "Two Minds" opposed, Rational vs. Sympathetic.) 

She has "three reasons for hope: the energy and commitment of youth"... (we noted yesterday the anniversary of the largest global climate protest in history, in 2019 led by Greta Thunberg), "the resilience of nature"... and "the human intellect"...

That last is easily lost sight of, as so much of our daily media diet stuffs us with human nonsense and stupidity. But this book is full of truly smart proposals that would bring head and heart into fortuitous and even salvific harmony. We just have to summon the will to get in harness and go.

So I'm with H.G. Wells. I believe in a universe of grown-ups like Albert who retain a playful spirit and  aren't afraid to distress fundamentalists with honest words and intelligent solutions.

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” H.G. Wells https://t.co/o8qWKQc6SW pic.twitter.com/phhdGDB8V0

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 21, 2022

Hang on

 My colleagues made me chair of a committee that meets this afternoon, so that I and not they would be tasked to draft a formal letter for the academic-bureaucratic mill. Lucky me. 

So I've sought inspiration in Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience. Unlike the one I'll write, this one by E.B. White deserves to be read and absorbed by every thoughtful but troubled human. There are quite a few of those... as I suppose there always have been.

Choosing life

It's the birthday of one of my favorite poets, Donald Hall. He wrote a lot about facing death and choosing life, especially after the death of his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon left him to face his 80s alone. He died at 89, in 2018. He faced his (and our) mortality with verbal honesty. And he loved the Red Sox.

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue. Essays After Eighty [Don@dawn]

Choosing life doesn't mean lying about death and dying. 

In Environmental Ethics today we'll finish The World-Ending Fire (hope it doesn't finish us) and begin to anticipate Regeneration, Paul Hawken's audaciously subtitled summons to action: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. 

That sounds wildly optimistic at first hearing, until you reflect on the fact that if we don't stem the crisis in this decade the jig will probably be up. If we can mobilize enough of us to exert our agency, he's saying, we can then begin backing away from the precipice and making a longer-term commitment to harmonizing our form of life with all the others we're implicated with, on this rock that would as soon shake as save us. If we don't, well... 

Wendell is not especially optimistic, but neither is he in despair. The interesting question to me at the nexus of these two texts, his and Hawkens', is how to frame the terms of our obligation to the future. Of course the future doesn't exist yet, except in our imaginations. (And it's possible, as we discussed vis-a-vis Augustine and as others have suggested in connection with Einstein and relativity, that neither past nor future really exists apart from our imaginatively constructed categorical projections.) 

But that's where every living present begins to anticipate someone else's, right? In the imagination? Our present was their future, their past is our present, and so it goes. We are the fortunate heirs of people who cared about us, though they knew they'd be long gone before we were ever a glint in anyone's eye. Giving all to the present is the only tangible way anyone will ever have, at least until the Vulcans are proved wrong about the impossibility of time travel, of paying forward the regenerative care we've benefitted from. 

"If putting the future of life at the heart of everything we do is not central to our purpose and destiny, why are we here?" asks Hawken. He answers:  "Regeneration is what life has always done; we are life, and that is our focus." Worries about a future dystopia are abstract, sounding the alarm about an irresponsible, indifferent, disengaged present is concrete. And WJ's "really vital question" about what life is going to make of itself and what our world is going to be should be our most urgent present preoccupation.

In our last batch of Wendell readings, he tells us that he cares more for his household than for his town, more for his town than his county, more for county than state, and on up the chain until he makes an imaginative leap that allows him to grasp an entity larger than the present. He says he does not care more for his country than for the world, which by my lexicon includes the world to come. Getting the equation right between "doorstep and planet" is not easy, but conscientious humans will always be cognizant of the fact that life in the best-case-scenario goes on. They'll also be eager and enthusiastic to do all they can to ensure the best and forestall the worst. Meanwhile, they'll share the gains and losses of their "community economies" in the here and now. They'll choose to do what they can to level the playing field of life. 

So, that does mean "putting the future of life at the heart of everything we do" now, in that present which is the only possible sphere of real agency we've got. (If we've got any agency at all.)  Does it not? 

But have we got any agency at all? There's a question for CoPhi today, for Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza...  

I'll repeat my standard line on that: If we've not got agency, it sure is a silly spectacle-- all those old dead philosophers having tried so hard to persuade us of their views on that subject and so many others, to get us to choose to see the world and (in some instances) to love the world the way they did. It sure looks like we have a choice.

And it looks like we have a rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to do something constructive with it.

Let me give Wendell the floor once more, to remind us all to remain open to the experience of "hours when [you are] deeply happy and content," multiple existential crises notwithstanding. The Mad Farmer gets the last laugh: 

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

And, let him remind us again that environmental destruction is "not inevitable, except by our submissiveness."

Effective agents act. They don't submit. Life regenerates, and it goes on.

Risking delight

Sitting up in bed, sipping coffee next to the open window not quite listening to BBC4's continuing coverage of the Queen's last exit (Anglophilia and demos being challenged bedfellows on such occasions), as the dogs still snooze ... My daily delight (minus the funeral), lately.

It's been my main message these many years, writing and teaching, that (as Margaret Renkl quotes Jack Gilbert) we must "risk delight" while we have the opportunity. The seasonal transition to autumn, astronomical and meteorological, is such an opportunity. “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” as The Mad Farmer says. Sorrow is ubiquitous, but oh the goldenrods and aster.

It happens this week, though the mercury is forecast to rise into the 90s once again in middle Tennessee after the recent respite of cool weather. It's been lovely to fling open the windows at dawn, and then pull on a light jacket and step into the cool for our morning Dogwalks. Interpreted loosely, Spinozistically, that's where we look for godly delight. Dog is my co-pilot. (Note to self: check out Alexandra Horowitz's latest...)

A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

 I'm going to look for more Jack Gilbert...

Lyceum

LISTEN. We're pleased, finally, to be bringing Professor Tadd Ruetenik of St. Ambrose University (in Davenport Iowa, south of the Field of Dreams and home of the lovely Quad Cities ballpark) to campus this afternoon for his Lyceum lecture (originally scheduled for March 2020 but canned by the pandemic) on "Sports: The Flywheel of the Military Industrial Complex" (5 pm, COE 164, followed-- as our friends at TPA always say-- by a spirited off-campus reception. 

#MTSU Philosophy Lyceum: The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies is happy to welcome Professor Tadd Ruetenik (St. Ambrose University) on “Sports: The Flywheel of the Military Industrial Complex”-
FRIDAY Sep 16, 5 PM
College of Education Room 164. Reception following. pic.twitter.com/SgcAiWD8sC

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 14, 2022

William James's student Morris Raphael Cohen once ineffectively proposed to him the notion of baseball, then still credibly billed as our national pastime, as a moral equivalent of war. "All great men have their limitations."

National rivalries and aspirations could find their intensest expression in a close international pennant race, and yet such rivalry would not be incompatible with the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game. (Baseball as a National Religion, The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

I'll be eager to defend my still-favorite pastime against the charge of complicity in our military-industrial complex. But I'm always up for bashing football (the American version).

It'll fall to me to introduce our guest, so I'm scouring this interview, this podcast, and this endorsement for useful material beyond the facts indicated on his department's website... 

"Professor Ruetenik teaches a variety of philosophy courses including American philosophy, critical thinking, philosophy of life, and philosophy of religion. He is a William James scholar and member of the William James Society (an organization I'm pleased to have had a small part in founding), Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and the American Philosophical Association..." Tadd is the author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States and Bodies and Battlefields: Abortion, War, and the Moral Sentiments of Sacrifice, and has published in The Pluralist, Contemporary Pragmatism, Teaching American Literature, The Journal of Philosophy and Theology, and The Journal of Religion and Health on topics ranging from animal ethics to Jane Addams to Christian Science.*

For instance,

I am following up on The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States with another book called The Genius of Emerson: Creativity, Divinity, and the Weirdness of Religious Innovation. Whereas Demons focused mostly on the internal side of weird religious belief, The Genius of Emerson is focused on the external side, the way that individuals’ claims of divinity can lead to the creation of new religious movements.

...

My early interest in being a famous baseball player ended when I become aware that that kind of competitiveness was not in my nature. I retain my interest in exercise though, and will walk or bike at least four times a week.

Tadd's a Jamesian, a peripatetic, a cyclist, a former Detroit metal rocker, a fan of Emerson, Thoreau, Cornel West, and baseball... but wary-- like Wendell Berry-- of competition. 

[N]o individual can lead a good or a satisfying life under the rule of competition... Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. --WB, "Economy and Pleasure"

I asked Tadd if there's anything he'd like to add to his introduction. He said "have that George Carlin bit handy..."

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.

Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!

Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called 

Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.

Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying... 

--George Carlin, Baseball and Football

Just in case it's not clear, George is a baseball fan. Like Tadd.

          

No wonder we invited him. 

==

Postscript.

There is a truly great community of philosophers at Middle Tennessee State University. #MTSU. The faculty and students were amazingly receptive, appropriately critical, and extraordinarily interesting. https://t.co/CS83TB8fva

— Tadd Ruetenik 🇨🇳 🇸🇧 (@ruetenik) September 18, 2022

To the library, and to literacy

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi we'll head to the library, to (re-)acquaint ourselves with its resources and ready ourselves for a bit of research in advance of midterm report presentations coming soon. 

Did any of you grow up, as our girls did, with Arthur Aardvark?

Librarians these days, having to deal with meddlesome parents and politicians who want to dictate what books can be on the shelves and what information can be allowed to flow freely in what we used to joke was still a free country, are on the front lines of the culture wars. We need to show them some solidarity and respect.

America's libraries are under attack. It's no longer enough that far-right interest groups and politicians are coming for our collections; they've turned their ire towards our staff too. In recent months, there has been an alarming trend of community members and officials calling for the dismissal of librarians over books they've purchased for their patrons — usually titles focusing on race, gender and sexuality. Groups like Moms for Liberty are training their members on how to target us on our personal social media pages. Library workers are being vilified in the same way as teachers — a troubling phenomenon that's contributing to the nationwide educator shortage... 

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them." In other words, if we lose our librarians, we lose a core element of our democracy. It's time to stand up for our librarians and their institutions before it's too late. 

Just under that Salon article:

Read more

about the right's assault on books and literacy

• "I would burn them": Republican lawmaker suggests taking Tennessee's book ban to the next level

Tennessee lawmakers are a meme, aren't they? An embarrassing one, like "Florida man" if you happen to live in the Sunshine State (or contemplate doing so in your Golden Years)?

I thought I was joking, then I looked it up. First hit is an Esquire magazine piece from 2020: 

• Seriously, Tennessee. Stop Electing These People.

Ha ha. Hard to be as amused as I'd like to be about that. State legislatures are torching democracy, and not just in the south. 

Thankfully, literacy still has able defenders like Wendell Berry. 

In Environmental Ethics today, we read in his "In Defense of Literacy" from 1970 (it could have been written yesterday) that

Ignorance of books and the lack of a critical consciousness of language were safe enough in primitive societies with coherent oral traditions. In our society, which exists in an atmosphere of prepared, public language — language that is either written or being read — illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger. Think how constantly the average American is surrounded by premeditated language, in newspapers and magazines, on signs and billboards, on TV and radio. He is forever being asked to buy or believe somebody else's line of goods. The line of goods is being sold, moreover, by men who are trained to make him buy it or believe it, whether or not be needs it or understands it or knows its value or wants it. This sort of selling is an honored profession among us. Parents who grow hysterical at the thought that their son might not cut his hair are glad to have him taught, and later employed, to lie about the quality of an automobile or the ability of a candidate.

That last line about hair is a bit dated, but the point it makes is fresh and relevant as ever. More than ever. Premeditated lying, bullshitting, and confabulating is more ubiquitous and appalling in American public discourse than any honest historian can recall. Language has been perverted, weaponized, to peddle the most preposterous fakery imaginable. Only those who read widely and critically have any chance of sorting through it all with a chance of discerning reality. It's not enough to possess the skills of literacy, one must habituate them in practice. As Mr. Twain said, those who do not read possess no advantage over those who cannot. Especially not now.

Wendell continues,

What is our defense against this sort of language — this language-as-weapon? There is only one. We must know a better language. We must speak, and teach our children to speak, a language precise and articulate and lively enough to tell the truth about the world as we know it. And to do this we must know something of the roots and resources of our language; we must know its literature. The only defense against the worst is a knowledge of the best. By their ignorance people enfranchise their exploiters.

He concludes that literacy, "the mastery of language and the knowledge of books," is our most practical defense against ignorance, hucksterism, and hopelessness. "Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow." 

So we're going to the right place, classes. Thanks, Ben Franklin.

The singular Ray Kurzweil

LISTEN. We had a serious and sober conversation in Environmental Ethics yesterday about the difference between living longer vs. living better, between a life of many years vs. a life of completion and earned satisfaction. I was encouraged by the maturity and wisdom of the young people in the room, whose acceptance of mortality stands in striking contrast to that of futurologist/transhumanist Raymond Kurzweil. 

Ray's the guy who pioneered optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology etc., and then went to work for Google to help Larry and Sergei figure out how to conquer aging and the biological restrictions of mortal life. He's the very antithesis, in this regard, of Wendell Berry.

I first became aware of Ray when I read his The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which audaciously and (we should see now) prematurely, if not ludicrously, predicted that we'd have self-conscious machines "before 2030"... We'll talk about this in CoPhi soon, when we turn to Descartes.

Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” has often been cited as emblematic of Western rationalism. This view interprets Descartes to mean “I think, that is, I can manipulate logic and symbols, therefore I am worthwhile.” But in my view, Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from non-mind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition?

Ask that again when they make that claim. If they do. 

At least Ray has inspired entertaining films like Her, Ex Machina, Transcendence...

But his desperate quest to "live long enough to live forever"-- see the Wired Magazine feature story on Ray,wherein it was revealed that he'd daily been popping upwards of 200 pill supplements and downing oceans of green tea every day in hopes of beating the Reaper (lately he's cut back to just 90)-- really does look sad and shallow, alongside the mature view we've explored in The World-Ending Fire and that I was gratified to hear echoed by my fellow mortals in class yesterday.

 

Writing is a physical act

LISTEN. In Environmental Ethics today, I need to re-assert my general admiration for Wendell Berry after last class when we went outside and I raised my voice to be heard over those obnoxious Peck Hall blowers. I didn't want to shout my challenge to what I see as his reductively binary approach to Two Minds, I just wanted to put it out there for our consideration. I just think we need all kinds of minds, and need all kinds of minds to make room for the consideration of other kinds.

So let me quickly agree with Wendell (in his 2004 essay "Quantity versus Form") that "the ideal of a whole or complete life" is not replaceable by the "ideal merely of a long life." Quality matters. "Ripeness is all." 

A complete life, a good life (though by no means the only kind of good life), is one in which we perceive our calling, do our work with satisfaction, marry well, raise a family, make effective common cause with neighbors and friends, live long and healthily enough to see our children and/or others' children capably succeed us, "continue in old age to be useful; and finally die a good or holy death surrounded by loved ones."

But what we have instead, in too many instances, is something far short of the ideal. "Death now apparently is understood, and especially by those who have placed themselves in charge of it, as a punishment for growing old, to be delayed at any cost." There is, as the better bioethicists tell us, such as thing as "an overly extended life." More is not always better.

In "Word and Flesh" (1989) Wendell says 

We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.

And [anticipating Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland],

Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources... We have an economy that depends not on the quality and quantity of necessary goods and services but on the moods of a few stockbrokers. We believe that democratic freedom can be preserved by people ignorant of the history of democracy and indiffierent to the responsibilities of freedom.

And then, though I own several computers and find the experience of writing with them congenial, I do also find myself in broad sympathy with the spirit of "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (1987) and "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine" (1989). In particular, I agree with the latter essay's statement that 

if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a 'world of the future'; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us... we have the same pressing need that we have always had--to love, care for, and teach our children. 

That's the view I've long admired, that "we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present"... [They] who work and behave well today have "discharged today's only obligation to the morrow." I wouldn't go so far as Wendell as to say they, we, need "take no thought" for it. But I agree, with Berry and Dewey and every other philosopher of presence, attention, and hope, that our first and final obligation is always to engage with and immerse in our own time, to the best effect we can manage. "My wish is simply to live my life as fully as I can."

And then Wendell wins my allegiance again when he says that writing is "of the body," and the best writing resists etherealizing itself. "I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind."

So I'm a flirt. But I get the point, that much speculative thought unmoors itself from solid earth. I say that all the time in class, when we turn to Pyrrhonic or Cartesian skepticism. How do I know I have a body, or am one? How do I not know it?! Take a firm step, draw in a sharp breath, lift a heavy object. You'll know.

And so of course I love it when Wendell says (good) writing, like good philosophizing, is 

preeminently a walker's art. It can be done of foot and at large. The beauty of its traditional equipment is simplicity. And cheapness. Going off to the woods, I take pencil and some paper (any paper--a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of feedsack), and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM... My mind is free to go with my feet.

And like spoken language generally, it's free to go with my mouth and eyes and ears and lungs. 

Reading aloud what we have written--as we must do, if we are writing carefully--our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body.

"Language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means." And philosophical means. Too many philosophers don't understand that.

And yet I must demur when Wendell insists that "a computer cannot help you to write better." He may be right about that, but this may also be an exception to the generally reliable observation that more is, more often than not, not better. My own process and routine are better, I believe, by virtue of the computer which allows me to be more fluent and less restricted by the cramp in my hand that my wife the back doc assures me is not arthritis or carpal tunnel or anything that can’t be fixed by a steadier commitment on my part to getting in line (so to speak). Aligned. 

But I do appreciate Wendell's insistence that if something's not broken it needn't be replaced. If you can write well with a pencil, and no less painfully with a machine, stick to the older technology. 

Or at least think about it. That’s why I call Wendell a Bluegrass Socrates, just as Peter Singer is an Aussie Socrates. They make you stop and think. 

And so do Machiavelli and Hobbes, the philosophers du jour in CoPhi. My favorite commentary on both of them features another Hobbes behaving like a Prince. We'll talk about what Machiavelli's virtu' does not have in common with virtue, whether the original Hobbes was really so beastly, and I'll recommend some good podcasts and videos addressing those and other questions.

And while we may not know much about time, we should know it's about time to select midterm report topics. Who wants to go first?

The Sabbath

Freethought of the Day: https://t.co/wnrVJSjKD8 pic.twitter.com/jGC4bUKa1X

— FFRF (@FFRF) September 12, 2022

Well, my Sabbath yesterday was highlighted by this... 

Matt and Samantha Brown received the memento of a lifetime on Sunday at PNC Park, as the couple ended up with Cardinals icon Albert Pujols’ historic 697th home run ball, which brought him to fourth place all time on the AL/NL homer leaderboard. When they went to return the ball to Pujols, he surprised them by encouraging them to keep the relic of baseball lore.

“It’s just a baseball. They deserve to have it. It went out of the ballpark,” Pujols said about the decision. “We play this game for the fans. So whether they want to give it back or they want to keep it, I don’t have any problem with that.” 

Sundays for me are for caring about things that don't ultimately matter. Sundays are Moral Holidays. "I just TAKE my moral holidays," no regrets. 

Maybe that's what Henry more charitably should have said, were he a more charitable fellow. Like Albert. The baseball doesn't matter. The perseverance, the kindness, the humanity matter a great deal. 

.@PujolsFive keeps climbing the list. 💪 pic.twitter.com/qFeWGW9Cp8

— MLB (@MLB) September 11, 2022

==

For the record: Saturday was a pretty terrific day here too. Good food and fun at the Richland Farmers Market, and a delightful time at Park Cafe that evening with old friends in from Bristol for Vandy Parents Weekend.  When you're happy and you know it...

Melding minds

Long day ahead, Curriculum Committee meeting at 8:30, regular classes 'til 5:45, the MALA Experience class 6-9, all book-ended by the usual long commute. Better get in the right frame of mind...

 In Environmental Ethics today I'll reiterate my concern that the two generic mindsets Wendell describes (in Two Minds) in mutual opposition, Rational and Sentimental, are better represented not as opponents but as dual aspects of the singularly inclusive mind we're going to have to develop if we're to think and act rationally, humanely, and sustainably about life--all life, not just ours and not just now--on Earth.

The Rational Mind, without being anywhere perfectly embodied, is the mind we all are supposed to be trying to have. It is the mind that the most powerful and influential people think they have. Our schools exist mainly to educate and propagate and authorize the Rational Mind. The Rational Mind is objective, analytical, and empirical; it makes itself up only by considering facts; it pursues truth by experimentation; it is uncorrupted by preconception, received authority, religious belief, or feeling. Its ideal products are the proven fact, the accurate prediction, and the “informed decision.” It is, you might say, the official mind of science, industry, and government.

The Sympathetic Mind differs from the Rational Mind, not by being unreasonable, but by refusing to limit knowledge or reality to the scope of reason or factuality or experimentation, and by making reason the servant of things it considers precedent and higher.

His Rational Mind is a caricature, the narrow stoic/Vulcan sort of sensibility fixated on a perverse logic that disregards its practitioners' humanity (even Spock was half human) combined with a rapacious, extractive capitalist "free"-market non-ethos committed to short-term profiteering and long-term indifference. 

I don't for a moment deny the existence of Rational minds of that sort, including a disproportionate percentage of plutocrats, politicians, and CEOs. I just resist ceding the concept of rationality to them, and failing to notice the larger and more humane values of many rationalists whose minds do in fact express sympathy for small farms and farmers, for people over profit, for a livable future for the many over the present greed of the few. 

As we prepare to observe the 21st (!) 9/11 anniversary,  let's acknowledge that the terrorists who brought down the towers (etc.) were not model representatives of any plausibly constructed rational mind. They were fanatical zealots who did not respect humanity or value life, except for that slice of it that replicated their own zealotry. 

[It is perhaps not incidental that Wendell wrote his reductively dichotomous essay not long after 9/11/01, a time when many found themselves grasping desperately for a rational comprehension of the incomprehensible.]

Wendell says the "optimists of scientific rationalism" are "scornful of limits," but that sounds to me less like a description of the sober scientists who've documented climate change and tried to convey their informed alarm to a distracted and disinterested public than of the relatively marginal techno-utopians, trans- and post-humanists, and Silicon Valley billionaires (and Musk and Bezos) who want to "live" (or be digitized and uploaded) forever. Maybe they're less marginal than I want to believe, in their Money=Power world, but I think it important to avoid tarring conscientious practitioners of evidence-based inquiry with gross general epithets and conflationary put-downs. 

And so, to Wendell's conclusion that

conservationists have not done enough when they conserve wilderness or biological diversity. They also must conserve the possibilities of peace and good work, and to do that they must help to make a good economy. To succeed, they must help to give more and more people everywhere in the world the opportunity to do work that is both a living and a loving. This, I think, cannot be accomplished by the Rational Mind. It will require the full employment of the Sympathetic Mind – all the little intelligence we have.

I say neither Upper Case Mind will do, standing alone. All the intelligence we have can't be little, it must include reason and sympathy (feeling, passion, sentiment) and every other responsive tool in our chest, standing or falling together. Are there really just two kinds of minds? Only if one of them is the kind that resists dichotomous reduction.

In CoPhi today it's Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, free will (with and without "strings" attached), and another opportunity to point out the limits of rational demonstration. I always try to muster more sympathy for those who want to prove the existence of a god than I instinctively feel, since I know that my own sense of the empowerment and responsibility we can derive from what I consider the right kind of godlessness is not universal among my fellow humans nor (particularly) among my fellow Tennesseans. We have to share this place, this land, this common ground. 

We're not all looking for credible reasons to back our beliefs, we're not all humble fallibilists when we assert our respective faiths and credos. But a great many of us are. Those are the rational (note the lower-case "r") humans whose minds try to make room for sympathy, empathy, fellow-feeling, tolerance, mutual support, and co-existence. Good communities are populated by such people. Wendell knows them. They're not caricatures, they're not rigidly Rational and Sympathetic.

As Mr. Spock used to say, when mind-melding: your mind to my mind, our minds are one etc. We can simulate the meld, not by a laying on of hands but by listening to one another and exercising a little of the imagination that begins to compensate for our ancestral certain blindness.

 

Finally this evening I'll rally what remains of my mind at 6 pm, when any sensible day should end, to head over to the Wiser-Patten Science Building and talk with the MALA class about Carl Sagan's cosmic philosophy. The subject is fundamentally the same: the wondrous worlds of possible experience open to those who open their minds.

Possible experience

Looking ahead to tomorrow night, and our second MALA class on the Varieties of Experience. 

Last week it was James's Varieties, this week it's Carl Sagan's. They were Gifford lecturers in Scotland in 1901-2 and 1985, respectively. Next semester I'll offer the full-length course, examining those lectures and the books subsequent to them in their entirety. 

This week I'll set the stage for Sagan by stepping back and recalling the profound impact his cosmic perspective on philosophy and science had on teenage me, beginning with The Cosmic Connection, continuing when I saw him speak in college, followed by Cosmos (book and series), Pale Blue Dot, and so many other explorations of what it means to be "starstuff contemplating the stars... a way for the cosmos to know itself."

More recently, Carl's widow Ann Druyan has ably represented cosmic philosophy with Cosmos: Possible Worlds, his daughter Sasha has elaborated its humanistic appeal with For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has carried the torch of science popularization in the Cosmos re-boots, on television, radio, podcasts, Twitter, and countless other platforms of social media and pop culture. His tribute to Carl is quite touching.

 

His cosmic perspective is precise in its implications for our true cosmopolitan identity. We all share a universal pedigree: "The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself."

Like her husband, Druyan is a humanist who dreams of a possible world that has transcended its petty chauvinisms, parochialisms, and nationalisms. "Imagine a world where the still unfolding story of the universe was told to every child as naturally as the nursery rhymes and fairy tales we fill their heads with today. How many fresh neurons and how much precious time do we waste when we busy our children's minds with nonsense during their most retentive years?"

What a world that might be. What wondrous varieties of experience they'd know. We owe them every effort to sustain the possibility.

Off the farm

In Environmental Ethics today Wendell notes the rapid historical decline of farmers in the U.S., whose numbers in the last half of the 20th century dropped by more than half. Fewer and fewer of us have direct personal memories of farm life. That's dreadful, if living close to the land that feeds the nation and the world, and thus learning to know and love it, are conditions of a healthy food ecology and sound environmental sensibility.

My dad, like his before him and on back to the first generation of Olivers to receive a grant to farm a parcel of rural mid-Missouri (Montgomery County) land back in the 1840s, grew up on the family farm. He left to study veterinary medicine, after serving a hitch in the army in the 50s. 

My earliest memory, age three, is being seated between him and my grandfather in an old pickup truck rolling down then-hilly and twisty Highway K en route to our new home and his new veterinary practice in St. Charles County. His clinic was in the basement of our home in O'Fallon. There's a Wal-mart there now, and the highway leading to it has been flattened and widened. It doesn't look like home anymore.

I have many fond subsequent memories, through the 60s of my childhood, of visiting my Uncle Glenn at his farm near the old home place. Later he'd own the original farm and for a time my dad owned my Uncle's old place. I remember climbing in the corn silo, riding on the giant combine and tractor, loading hay bales onto a flatbed trailer, looking into a pitch-black night sky, imagining what my dad's childhood must have been like. 

 I now know no one who farms.

And so in class we'll ask: 

• Can we be "a healthy people in a healthy land" if we remain literally and emotionally detached from hands-on agriculture, not knowing or particularly caring where our supermarket commodities come from or how they got to us?
• Do you think patronizing large grocery chains like Kroger and Publix necessarily implicates us in supporting "bad [industrial] agriculture"?
• Have you ever participated in CSA? If not, do you intend to?
• Do you agree that industrial agriculture "cannot use the land without abusing it"? 
• Is violence inherent in the (industrial agriculture) system? 
• What does "stewardship" mean to you?
• Is the "market value" of land irrelevant, from an environmental standpoint? 
• What is the true source of "abundance"? 
• What does it mean to be "landed"? Can an urban apartment-dweller be landed?
• Is anything "inevitable"?
• What would or could you do if forced by war or some other cataclysm to "live from [your] home landscapes"? 
• Is it wrong for a few powerful people to own and control the land? 
• What does it mean to you to acknowledge that "eating is an agricultural act"? 

That last line, the one that captivated Michael Pollan ("The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollan's Food Obsession") and led him to his distinguished career as a food philosopher, will be our catalyst to ask if we do or should feel obliged to follow any "food rules"? 

For Pollan, "eating is an agricultural act" offers more insight into how food relates to the world than Thoreau or Emerson's words ever could.

Perhaps more than any living writer, Michael Pollan has convinced America that food is a story—and that there's pleasure, health, and good conscience in untangling farm-to-fork narratives. For many, books like The Omnivore's Dilemma have been a gateway to more mindful eating, a path to heightened curiosity about farming and the natural world, a road to the conviction that we really are what we eat.

But what got Michael Pollan thinking about food? In a recent interview by phone, Pollan explained his transformation from Harper's editor to a writer about gardens—and from there corn fields, supply chains, and food rules. When I asked him if a particular text has guided the ethos of his work, he pointed to a line from Wendell Berry's short manifesto, "The Pleasures of Eating," that urges us to be curious and make connections... (continues) 

The Maira Kalman-illustrated edition of Food Rules is great, but Rule 1 is problematic if you had my grandmother and have a taste for, say, sushi and Indian. But I get the spirit of "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

Rule 7 reminds me of my old Hoosier-Tar Heel friend's running joke about Diesel Fried Chicken: "Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline."

In CoPhi we'll talk Epicureans and Stoics, anticipating Thursday's Wendell readings--one of which I'll have to raise a small dissent over. Seems to me Wendell's view of Rationality, at least as he articulates it in one of our essays, targets hyper-Stoics. Or Vulcans, but not the sensible rationalists who do love the land and want to think sensibly about it. 

We have to find a way to bring Sympathy and feeling into the domain of what Wendell calls The Rational Mind, to the exclusion of neither. We can't leave Reason and Sympathy at loggerheads. 

That should be a Rule too.