Some 'isms worth keeping

 T.S. Eliot was weird, April is not the cruellest month. November is a far better candidate, except for its association with the spirit of gratitude. 

I'm a lot more grateful for it, now that we've started hosting our own modest Thanksgiving repast and inviting only those family members we're sure won't offer prayerful thanks for "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" (but I do like some of his nicknames).

I'm grateful too that the MLB season now spills into November. Go Phils!

And I'm grateful that the TPA event, in the past usually held the first weekend in November, was back this year on the loveliest of late October weekends. The Vandy campus was gorgeous, the sessions were good, conversation with old friends was gratifying. 

As for the upshot of my own session on secularity/'ism, I come away with a desire to dive deeper into Charles Taylor's Secular Age and the Oxford Handbook thereof; and with a strengthened conviction that the best way to avoid absolutism and dogmatism is by courting and claiming all the better 'isms, not fixating on just one or jettisoning them all. 

The worst snares of ideological rigidity and intolerance are not, I say, an automatic feature of belief in the immanence of our experience in the pervasively (ubiquitously, globally) natural world.  That experience is, as WJ said, "self-containing and leans on nothing." That in brief is the essence of humanism, and it's anything but dogmatic or absolutist or destructive of humane values and purposes.

Thus, I still agree with Barack Obama (as quoted on p.137 of Copson's Very Short Intro) that it's fine to defend our religious and irreligious beliefs in the public square but it's not acceptable to  invoke them coercively and illiberally. We must translate them into a more universal language, we must hash them out on the state side of the wall of separation. 

So for me, I'm still a proud secularist, humanist, pluralist, pragmatist, natural transcendentalist, and anti-absolutist/dogmatist. I'm not giving up my favored 'isms until I can find a grammatical way of dispensing with them without clouding my philosophical commitments and humanistic identity beyond accurate conveyance. 

Still, they're just labels. A rose is a rose, after all.

Speaking of Shakespeare, in CoPhi we'll officially close Why Grow Up with a message that often gets missed: growing up and growing older does not have to be a steady and inexorable downhill plummet. The Bard was not saying, in As You Like It, that Life sucks, then you die. You'll slow down and smell the roses, if you do it right. You don't have to end up infirm and grumpy. If you do end up infirm, cheer up. Life is still terminal for us all, but as the great Yogi said: it ain't over yet, while you've still got some marbles to play with.

In Environmental Ethics we turn to Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. It's a work of cli-fi, and may not be a brilliant piece of literature. [More cli-fi... and more... A Weird Wonderful Conversation w/KSR & Ezra Klein includes a very Wendell Berry-esque moment when KSR acknowledges the power of place... In another conversation, KSR says he no longer thinks our destiny is the stars but in 10,000 years it could be a terraformed Mars...]

That's the opinion my pal from Huntsville expressed this weekend, while conceding that it's nonetheless full of great ideas; I'm reserving literary judgment. But KSR is indeed a fount of great and hopeful ideas, and he's really good at taking the long view. With Election '22 just ahead, I think we're all gonna want to remember to do that. It ain't over yet.

So, let's retrieve some more worthy 'isms from absolutist/dogmatist misappropriation: Survivalism (Avasthana in Sanskrit, KSR advises). Longtermism (see  What We Owe the Future). And then, especially, Eudaimonism. The promise of effective action in the face of climate change now is nothing less than the prospect of a perpetually flourishing humanity far into the future. 

But in light of a pair of this morning's ominous headlines-- The Pandemic Generation Goes to College. It Has Not Been Easy and What Do America’s Middle Schools Teach About Climate Change? Not Much--  we're going to have to do a much better job of instilling that vision in the generation now coming up.