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
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