The aspirational we

LISTEN. Don't forget to vote, unless you're planning to vote for democracy-denying fascists (in which case you're probably pretty good at forgetting the hard-won lessons of history).

Today in CoPhi it's the first chapter of Sick Souls Healthy Minds and WJ's "Dilemma of Determinism"-

The dilemma of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and ethical, in us.

Determinists are pessimists if they think all our natural regrets are futile, for--after all--the fascists were always going to behave fascistically, no matter what we thought or said about them. But they're subjectivists if they think we can learn important moral lessons from the passing spectacle of futility, and thus produce an enlightened "consciousness"... for whatever that might be worth. Finally, as I read James, we must resist the dilemma and be neither pessimists nor subjectivists. But we can still embrace subjectivity. Just don't think all is lost, or (what comes to the same thing) that all is rigidly and irresistibly determined.  

But the most delightfully provocative reference in the chapter is to WJ's 1906 letter to H.G. Wells on the American definition of "success," and its indictment of "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease."

That diagnosis stands up. What's the cure?

I committed to a new text selection for CoPhi next semester today, Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. It may be a good choice for the Happiness course next Fall, too. Setiya thinks we should strive less for happiness and more for meaning and a feeling of gladness to be alive in spite of everything, and for the courage to "cope with grace when life is hard." 

Had a preliminary conversation with a colleague about doing a "sidecar" or collaborative version of Happiness. That might be worth trying, in these trying times. 

Today in Environmental Ethics we're up to chapter 37 in Ministry for the Future. Along the way we ponder whether there really are Tzadikim Nistarium in our midst, anonymous ordinary heroes who "keep the world from falling apart." It would be nice to think so, when the evidence points so strongly towards the prevalence of their opposite number. What's a fancier way of saying "Chaos Agents"? And how, anyway, do we distinguish the righteous and just from the self-righteous and perfidious?

Also interesting, the thought that our habit of slapping period labels on chunks of our history (geological, technological, bronze, agricultural, industrial, anthropocentric et al) might be to the good. "Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that...the order of things" is in constant flux. 

But perhaps instead it seduces us into thinking there's something locked in and inexorable about our particular moment in time. What we really need (don't we?) is the will to transcend (imaginatively) this and that and every particular period and to acknowledge the unity and interconnectedness of all history. But we don't need to leap from that into a Hegelian sort of historicist essentialism. Our very survival, and that of the human community in its entirety, comes without guarantees.

Are we wrong to discount future generations? KSR offers a strong indictment of the homo economicus mindset and its distortions of value. So does William MacAskill, who's said at TED and elsewhere and now lately in What We Owe the Future that "preserving the future of humanity is among the most important problems that we currently face." 

That's an aspirational we, rooted in fundamentally the same hopeful impulse that impels us red-state gerrymandered voters to go to the polls election after election although our voting districts and voting rights have been diced and quartered and discounted too. It's the least we can do for the future, but we still must hope it's not the most. As Jules Verne said (according to the postcard I just sent to Older Daughter), "the future is but the present a little further on." Uh-oh.