"cowardice in a pure form"

"When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes. An expert operation carried out by dedicated public servants. And when you watch members of Congress tiptoe away from their duty to deal with the danger those men faced, you see cowardice in a pure form..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/garrisonkeillor/p/the-six-minute-video-speaks-louder?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

But is "Patriotism" the right word for it?

I, too, want to understand the "complexities of America" and I enjoy reading McCullough (et al) and watching Ken Burns. I want to affirm America's stated (but too-often neglected) ideals of liberty and justice for all. But we need a word safe from misappropriation by scoundrels and MAGAts. How about Humanism (with an American pedigree)?

The Necessity of Patriotism (Even in Times Like These)

America is rebounding, but will cynicism stop the renewal?

...Sure, there was some of the resentful, rotten patriotism you now see at MAGA rallies, but there was also a more mature kind of patriotism, the love you have for your country when you know its flaws. It was a curious kind of patriotism, one that wanted to understand the full complexities of America, that wanted to read David McCullough, John Hope Franklin and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and watch those Ken Burns documentaries.

Personally, that kind of patriotism gave me a sense of identity and belonging. It ripped me from the prison of the present and placed me in a long procession of Americans — the dead, the living and the unborn. It broke through the walls that separate one person from another and gave me a sense of membership in a community so varied and so much to be treasured that I have never been able to hate Americans who differ from me politically... David Brooks

An Open Letter to Governor Lee on the Slaughter of Our Children

You may be the only one in this entire state who could do something to protect our children. You could do it if you wanted to.

...It was never likely that events this week would change your commitment to serving up every item on the gun lobby's agenda, I admit, but I still had hope. There's nothing "other" about this school community to hide behind, no way to pass it off as something that only happens in other places. Maybe you would see it this time. Maybe it would be personal this time. I kept hoping that your delay in responding was a sign that you were gathering the courage to do the right thing.

You weren't, though. When you finally spoke, it was not to introduce a plan to reduce gun violence and prevent the slaughter of our community's beloved children. When you finally spoke, it was to say nothing at all. 

--Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books "Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South" and "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss."

A pluralistic direction

Tomorrow afternoon's Lyceum speaker John Stuhr:

"Near the very end of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James wrote that every day we each face choices between good and evil, between life and death. In a tone I take to be both egalitarian and humble, he added: “From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor’s lectures and no array of books can save us” (WB, 162).

James was right: By themselves, lectures and books and their authors will not save your life. They won’t win you friends. Reading a book—even this one!—will not get you a promotion or make you wealthy. They won’t make someone else love you, understand you, or even treat you kindly—or ensure that you treat others with love, understanding, and kindness. They will not take away all your fears or longings. They won’t bring you recognition, physical health, or personal well-being. No one has flourished merely by reading a book or simply by taking in a lecture.

Realization of purposes requires living, not just a theory of life. It requires living reflectively and not just a life of reflection. Above all, it requires action—and the hope, faith, or melioristic temperament to take up action in the face of possibilities without guarantees. And this requires the attention and hard work of staying at it, keeping up the action. I hope that this book on, across, with, and through James, at times without (and even against) James, and always from my own fallible angle of vision and selective purposes, can contribute for its readers—for you—to this larger pragmatic, radically empirical, and pluralistic endeavor.

James’s writings, when taken both in full and critically, constitute an invaluable resource for the future and its new problems, new possibilities, and new forms of personal and social life. In this sense, all persons who enter into and take up James’s vision and worldview share a journey with no end other than itself, a pluralistic admission—ever not quite!—and a pluralistic direction: TOWARD."

"No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism" by John J. Stuhr: https://a.co/1kQOPFk

The human dimension

"Religious, non-religious, philosophical, practical, and humanities-teaching humanists—what do all these meanings have in common, if anything? The answer is right there in the name: they all look to the human dimension of life.

What is that dimension? It can be hard to pin down, but it lies somewhere in between the physical realm of matter and whatever purely spiritual or divine realm may be thought to exist. We humans are made of matter, of course, like everything else around us. At the other end of the spectrum, we may (some believe) connect in some way with the numinous realm. At the same time, however, we also occupy a field of reality that is neither entirely physical nor entirely spiritual. This is where we practice culture, thought, morality, ritual, art—activities that are (mostly, though not entirely) distinctive to our species. Here is where we invest much of our time and energy: we spend it talking, telling stories, making pictures or models, working out ethical judgments and struggling to do the right thing, negotiating social agreements, worshipping in temples or churches or sacred groves, passing on memories, teaching, playing music, telling jokes and clowning around for others’ amusement, trying to reason things out, and just generally being the kinds of beings that we are. This is the realm that humanists of all kinds put at the center of their concern.

Thus, whereas scientists study the physical world, and theologians the divine one, humanities-humanists study the human world of art, history, and culture. Non-religious humanists make their moral choices based on human well-being, not divine instruction. Religious humanists focus on human well-being, too, but within the context of a faith. Philosophical and other kinds of humanists constantly measure their ideas against the experience of real living people."

"Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope" by Sarah Bakewell: https://a.co/3LETOjK

The experience of Opening Day

"The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too." 

-Why Time Begins on Opening Day, by Thomas Boswell

Why (and how) walking helps us think

Worth revisiting:

...Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down... Ferris Jabr

https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYFHluMMoT/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

Humanly Possible, by Sarah Bakewell

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001kgm7?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

NYTimes.com: 5 Killed in Shooting at Christian School in Nashville, Hospital Says

Heartbreaking. Disgusting. Why does this society continue to tolerate such unspeakable barbarism?!

The shooter died after police officers responded Monday morning at the Covenant School, the authorities said. Details remained sparse... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/us/nashville-shooting-covenant-school.html?smid=em-share

Back

 Back from yet another fine Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in Ottawa, on the Kansas side of KC. I talked this time about characterful characters of the game, players who were characters in the eccentric sense of the term but also possessed of character in the Greek sense (αρετη [aretê], excellence, virtue).

The school's prez was kind to give me an OU baseball cap just for driving so far to get there, I always joke about the half-dozen or so steps I used to take to present at the conference back when MTSU hosted it and my colleagues thought it amusing to schedule my talks across the hall in "Dining Room C" (they wanted me to submit a travel reimbursement request, just to mess with our administrative accountants). Couldn't do that now, DRC is now TBTV. 

It was good to reconnect with family en route, and my old college roomie, and the conference colleagues I look forward to seeing every March just before Opening Day. 

Morning keynoter Brad Balukjian, a biologist and fan who tracked down most of the aging athletes he found in an old 1986 Topps waxpack of baseball cards, was excellent and a lot of fun to hang out with at the pre-conference reception and post-conference Happy Hour. It was good of him to attend my talk. 

Lunch keynoter and Cooperstown Hall of Famer Andre Dawson was charming and funny. Wish he'd attended my talk too, and seen the slide that quoted Richard Ford's appreciation in The Lay of the Land:

“The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone…”

What a moment that must've been for old Frank Bascombe. But of course Frank is fictional. I caught Dale Sveum's foul ball in St. Pete in 1992, that was real life. (Dale was no Hawk, but he did eventually get to manage the Cubs.)

   

That first night in Ottawa was different, we stayed in an airbnb that used to be City Hall.

 

After Happy Hour we made our way up the road to Lawrence and dinner at Fields and Ivy. 

The next morning we spent a delightful couple of hours at the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence...

(Did you know Harry loved baseball?)--

...followed by a late lunch at the best KC bbq I've had yet, at an unassuming little place down the street from Harry's old home called A Little BBQ Joint.

And then another overnight family visit, and finally home.

It's good to write this down, as it is to write up all of life's positive experiences. They get even better with each re-telling. 

And now, on the almost-eve of MLB Opening Day, it's can't-wait 'til next year!

What a fine time this is, early Spring! A renewal of life, you might think to call it.

Meliori-, not multi-, is the better 'verse

I Fantasized About Multiple Timelines, and It Nearly Ruined My Life

The multiverse has become a favorite pop cosmology. But there's a danger in getting fixated on the fantasy that there are other, better versions of our world.

...It's easy to see the appeal of the multiverse, even as metaphor: the notion that we're surrounded by a multitude of parallel selves, one of which might be living in a better timeline than the one we're stuck in. It's probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped. Who doesn't want to imagine a different world?

But it can also be a dangerous way of imagining the cosmos. Like the Capgras patient, we risk becoming detached from the world we can see and touch. Regardless of whether we can prove that the multiverse exists, the idea of it can distract us from doing the work we need to do to make this world better. This timeline is the only one we have access to, and it's got to be enough... S.I. Rosenbaum

Solvitur ambulando

As I never tire of repeating...

Whatever the Problem, It's Probably Solved by Walking

A walk begins to carve out space between my thoughts that allows clarity to rise up through my shoes.

Walking is the worst-kept secret I know. Its rewards hide under every step.

Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There's something else at play in walking that interests me more. And with the arrival of spring, attention must be paid... Andrew McCarthy

Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference, 2023

On the road again, soon. It's good to be heading back to Ottawa for this conference, which has failed to convene in two of the last three years. My sixteenth time presenting, I think. 

==
Thursday, March 23, 2023
6:00 p.m.

Pre-Game Reception, optional
421 South Elm Street
Ottawa, KS 66067

Angry River BBQ and drinks are provided for attendees at no additional charge.

Friday, March 24, 2023

7:45 a.m.
Registration and Breakfast

8:15 a.m.
Welcome
Andy Hazucha, Conference Coordinator
Reggies Wenyika, OUKS Campus President


8:30 — 9:15 a.m.
Morning Keynote Address:
Morning Keynote Speaker: Brad Balukjian, author of The Wax Pack
Location: Schendel Conference Center


9:30 — 10:30 a.m.
Concurrent Sessions A

Session A1: Baseball's Eccentric Characters
Location: Hasty Conference Room
Chair: Jordie Smith, Ottawa University"He's Number One: The Lasting Legacy of Old Hoss Radbourn's Digitus Medius"Shawn O'Hare, Carson-Newman University
"The Ugly Truth about a Beautiful Sport: Ted Sullivan and Racism in the Early Days of Baseball"Pat O'Neill, Independent Scholar
Tom Coffman, Independent Scholar
"Characters of the Game: Virtue, Integrity and Eccentricity in Our Pastime" Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University

Session A2: The Economics and Psychology of Baseball
Location: Zook Conference Room
Chair: George Eshnaur, Ottawa University"Scouting vs. Statistics: Wisdom Lost in Numbers"Peter Jacobsen, Ottawa University
"Empirical Shifts in Major League Baseball Roster Management: Effects of the 1976 Labor Agreement"Chris Azevedo, University of Central Missouri
"Automatic Strike Zone? Four Human Views of a Pitch Reduced to a Computer's Ruling"Joc Collins, Carson-Newman University


10:35 — 11:35 a.m.
Concurrent Sessions B

Session B1: Baseball in Culture

Location: Hasty Conference Room
Chair: Jordie Smith, Ottawa University

"What's in a Name? Cleveland Indians to Guardians: How a Team's Name Feels to the Fans"

Ken Moon, Iowa Western Community College


"Multiversal Language: Sports, Esperanto, and a Passport to Many Worlds"

David Prihoda, Ottawa University

Session B2: Kansas Baseball History
Location: Zook Conference Room
Chair: Steve Foulke, Ottawa University"Early Baseball Programs at Kansas Colleges"Doug Wright, Independent Scholar
"Baseball Goes to Town: Bushong and Comiskey, Kansas"Mark Eberle, Fort Hays State University
"Quiet Giants: Jackie Mitchell, JL Wilkinson, and the Wichita Monrovians; Amplifying Baseball's Less-heard Voices"Kyle Belanger, Springfield College
Maeve Bolin, Lansing High School (KS)


11:45 a.m. — 1:15 p.m.

Luncheon and Afternoon Keynote Address:
Location: Schendel Conference Center
Afternoon Keynote Speaker: Andre Dawson


1:30 — 2:30 p.m.

Concurrent Sessions C
Session C1: Baseball History
Location: Hasty Conference Room
Chair: George Eshnaur, Ottawa University"Baseball at 47 Degrees: Early Baseball in Northern Minnesota"Eric Berg, Bemidji State University
"Lou Gehrig's Auto Accident on December 27, 1937, in Jefferson City, TN: Many Questions and Some Answers"Gerald C. Wood, Carson-Newman University

Session C2: Baseball Rants, Baseball Cards
Location: Zook Conference Room
Chair: Lyn Wagner, Ottawa University"Baseball, Madness, and Losing It"Justin Clarke, Ottawa University
"Don't Just Collect. Display Your Collection"Darrin Daugherty, Independent Scholar
"The Boom of Baseball Card Collecting: It Might Look Different Than You Remember"Alan Boelter, Ottawa University


2:35 — 3:35 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions D

Session D1: Baseball Icons and Unknowns
Location: Hasty Conference Room
Chair: Mike Webber, Franklin County Historical Society"Two Writers, One Game: Roger Angell and Ron Darling"Sarah D. Bunting, TomatoNation.com
"Lou Reynolds: The 'Grand Old Man' of Baseball in Kewanee, Illinois"Dean Karau, Independent Scholar
"Reconsidering the 'Losing Pitcher'"Warren Tormey, Middle Tennessee State University

Session D2: Baseball in Literature
Location: Zook Conference Room
Chair: Phil Wedge, University of Kansas​"'Oh you little yellow house': Ring Lardner's Busher Figure as Fetish Object"Scott D. Peterson, University of Missouri-St. Louis
"From Fowler to Robinson, from Gilead to Home"Steve Andrews, Grinnell College
"Weaving Baseball Facts (and Cubs Curses) into Thriller Fiction"Dennis Hetzel, Fresh Angle Communications


3:40 — 4:40 p.m.
Session E: Baseball Fiction, Poetry and Creative Nonfiction
Location: Hasty Conference Room
Chair: Shannon Dyer, Ottawa University"Your Best Gibbie Story from Breakfasts with Mudcat"Daniel T. Durbin, University of Southern California
"Nine Innings of Musings: Baseball History through the Prism of Poetry"Nicholas Bush, Motlow State Community College
"Excerpt from The Last American Boy: A Counterfactual Novel-in-Progress"Scott D. Peterson, University of Missouri-St. Louis

Stephen Hawking: still wondering about life, the universe, and everything

LISTEN. Gary wonders what we think of this "new bend on the cosmos," though it sounds to me more like the old bend that alleges the need for a design-explanation of the "fine-tuning" of the physical constants of the universe, the anthropic principle etc. 

Far be it from me to challenge the genius of Stephen Hawking, but I really think Carl Sagan got it right near the end of chapter 2 in VSE when he said this sort of thinking implies a failure of imagination and possibly a dangerous fatalism. Any universe in which organisms are capable of wondering about their origins will be one in which the conditions that enabled their particular form of existence had to one way and not another. But that doesn't show things were designed to be just that way. Can't we just be cosmically lucky? Isn't it obvious that life on earth could have evolved very differently, under different initial conditions? Or maybe this really is an "everything everywhere all at once" multiverse, which would indeed stretch the imagination. 

But it will be fascinating to read  On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's final theory. Isn't it inspiring that someone whose experience was as constricted as Hawking's could still produce such an impressive body of work, and is still provoking deep reflection on the human condition! -jpo

A Brief History of Time is 'wrong', Stephen Hawking told collaborator

In 2002 Thomas Hertog received an email summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen Hawking. The young researcher rushed to Hawking's room at Cambridge. "His eyes were radiant with excitement," Hertog recalls.

Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: "I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective."

Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10m, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe.

Next month, five years after Hawking's death, that book – On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's final theory – will be published in the UK. Hertog will outline its origins and themes at a Cambridge festival lecture on 31 March.

"The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life," says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium... Guardian

==

And then, consider Rebecca Goldstein's critique of Argument #5 (of 36)...

5. The Arguments from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

1. There are a vast number of physically possible universes.

2. A universe that would be hospitable to the appearance of life must conform to some very strict conditions: Everything from the mass ratios of atomic particles and the number of dimensions of space to the cosmological parameters that rule the expansion of the universe must be just right for stable galaxies, solar systems, planets, and complex life to evolve.

3. The percentage of possible universes that would support life is infinitesimally small (from 2).

4. Our universe is one of those infinitesimally improbable universes.

5. Our universe has been fine-tuned to support life (from 3 & 4).

6. There is a Fine-Tuner (from 5).

7. Only God could have the power and the purpose to be the Fine-Tuner.

8. God exists.

Philosophers and physicists often speak of "The Anthropic Principle," which comes in several versions, labeled "weak," "strong" and "very strong." All three versions argue that any explanation of the universe must account for the fact that we humans ( or any complex organism that could observe its condition) exist in it. The Argument from Fine-Tuning corresponds to the Very Strong Anthropic Principle. Its upshot is that the upshot of the universe is . . . us. The universe must have been designed with us in mind.

FLAW 1: The first premise may be false. Many physicists and cosmologists, following Einstein, hope for a unified "theory of everything," which would deduce from as-yet-unknown physical laws that the physical constants of our universe had to be what they are. In that case, ours would be the only possible universe. (See also The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe,# 35, below).

FLAW 2: Even were we to accept the first premise, the transition from 4 to 5 is invalid. Perhaps we are living in a multiverse (a term coined by William James), a vast plurality (perhaps infinite) of parallel universes with different physical constants, all of them composing one reality. We find ourselves, unsurprisingly (since we are here doing the observing), in one of the rare universe that does support the appearance of stable matter and complex life, but nothing had to have been fine-tuned. Or perhaps we are living in an "oscillatory universe," a succession of universes with differing physical constants, each one collapsing into a point and then exploding with a new big bang into a new universe with different physical constants, one succeeding the other over an infinite time span. Again, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one of those time-slices in which the universe does have physical constants that support stable matter and complex life. These hypotheses, which are receiving much attention from contemporary cosmologists, are sufficient to invalidate the leap from 4 to 5. --36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

JWST’s cosmic revelations will change our interior lives too

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
– from Critique of Practical Reason (1788) by Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the external, material world collided with long-standing religious and moral traditions premised solely on internal, a priori knowledge. But for Immanuel Kant, the 'sensible world' of appearances emerged from cognitive faculties of the human mind, constitutive of observations gained through human experience. 'We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them,' he wrote. Kant analogised his reframing of metaphysics to Copernicus's heliocentrism, in which the astronomer's observations made sense only when he placed the Sun, rather than Earth, at the centre. 'An object of the senses' like a new planet observed from a telescope, wrote Kant, 'conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition', resolving the perceived discrepancy between the observable world and the mind's contemplation of it.

The Enlightenment's radical political philosophy, shifting Europeans' governance from aristocratic absolutism to freedom gained through reason, dovetailed with Kant's philosophy of science. Observations of a band of stars that appeared to enring the sky led him to surmise that the solar system was shaped like a disc around the Sun. 'Matter [is] … bound to certain laws, and when it is freely abandoned to those laws, it must necessarily bring forth beautiful combinations,' he wrote in 1755. 'There is a God just because nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.' A reasoned universe and a reasoned mind operated together.

Kant's 'sensible world' of the 18th century was Earth, the solar system and the stars in the sky. If Kant's philosophy holds true, then anticipated astrophysical phenomena of the observable cosmos must continue to be integrated into humans' self-emplacement in an ever-expanding internal universe as well. Increasingly sophisticated technologies of visual perception – from Galileo's spyglass to ground- and then space-based telescopes – mediate our entwined expanding astrophysical and moral universes.

Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began returning images in July 2022, and is poised to deepen humans' sensibility of the cosmos and ourselves. Astronomers expect that it will reveal novel astrophysical phenomena both one step beyond the familiar and the presently unimaginable. With its 6.5-metre gold-coated primary mirror and unprecedented sensitivity to long infrared wavelengths, the telescope's deep field resolves distant star clusters in unparalleled detail. These images could help astronomers model the 'cosmic spring' that led to the formation of galaxies through gravitational mechanisms and life itself. The JWST could also pave the way to realise NASA scientists' long-quested goal to detect extraterrestrial life, expanding beyond microbes on the surface of Mars or in the Venusian atmosphere, which would shore up a generalised theory of biology and evolution. The apprehension of biosignatures – indications of life in exoplanetary atmospheres – would demand a reordering, not only of how humans perceive the Universe, but of ourselves as living, if perhaps not lonely, beings within it... Aeon

“far better”

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan

Enlighten up

"…The Enlightenment in general, and its greatest philosopher, Kant, in particular, are accused of holding reason in the sort of uncritical adulation earlier ages had for God. The frequency of the charge is puzzling in view of the fact that you needn't read much to see its foolishness–the very first sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason is a statement about reason's limits. Enlightenment thinkers never held reason to be unlimited; they just refused to let church and state be the ones to set the limits on what we can think. Nor is reason opposed to passion, a subject to which Enlightenment thinkers devoted nearly as much space as to thought. This was an age, after all, in which men and women wept in public over melodrama. For calling reason our highest faculty, Kant has been compared to the Reign of Terror and the Marquis de Sade, or less dramatically dismissed as dour, severe and slightly mad. Readers who do so misunderstand his conception of reason entirely. It's a large conception, embracing the capacity to do logic and mathematics and figure out the best means to getting whatever end you may happen to want tomorrow. But these, for Kant, are banal sorts of reasoning. Far more important is what he calls the real use of reason: the ability to form ideas of goodness, truth and beauty that orient us in action. Through those ideas, reason can make claims on nature and validate thereby our deepest longings. Pace fashionable caricatures, the Enlightenment's icon is not the cold, rule-obsessed technocrat but Mozart's self-possessed Figaro–the servant who uses his own reason to get the better of his feudal master in order to realize the passion that is deeper and truer than any the aristocracy can display.

Finally, and most recently, it's common to blame the Enlightenment for ecological disaster. Critics charge that Enlightenment thinkers' inclination to defend what they considered reasonable over what was considered natural set up an opposition between reason and nature which encouraged the human domination of nature that has so dramatically backfired in recent years. This objection ignores the fact that the Enlightenment appealed to nature more often than not, arguing that the claims of reason were more natural than the claims of arbitrary convention. Even more important, where reason was opposed to nature, it was in the interest of questioning conventions that tradition insisted were natural. Consider some of the things generally held to be natural at the start of the eighteenth century: poverty, slavery, the subjection of women, feudal hierarchies and most forms of illness. As late as the nineteenth century some English clerics would argue that efforts to relieve the Irish famine contravened the natural order willed by God. What is natural is contested. As Enlightenment thinkers realized, you cannot abolish slavery, overthrow existing hierarchies or cure illness unless you can show that they are not necessarily part of the way the world is. The ability to question what is natural and what is not is the first step towards any form of progress. The Enlightenment sought moral progress; technological progress was only desirable insofar as it brought humankind more happiness and freedom. To be sure, it was impossible to foresee every consequence of the technological advances the Enlightenment set in motion. But before you blame the Enlightenment for some of the technological advances we might do without, you might pause to be grateful for the processes it set in motion that doubled the lifetime you have in which to complain about it. Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you're committed to Enlightenment, you're committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. Twenty-first-century Enlightenment must extend the work of the eighteenth by examining new dangers to freedom, and extending social justice. Growing up depends on both."

— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/bAaTFCu

19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring

Especially looking forward to

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell 

Bakewell illuminates the long tradition of humanism — which explores the moral dimensions of what it really means to be human — using the work of great philosophers, artists and writers. The beauty of her study is the range of her examples: We're unlikely to see Charles Darwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Frederick Douglass, Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster, to name a few, together anywhere else outside of an encyclopedia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/books/new-nonfiction-books-spring-2023.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring

"We are literally connected"

The Transcendent Brain: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Spirituality for the Science-Spirited

"Most transcendent experiences are completely ego-free. In the moment, we lose track of time and space, we lose track of our bodies, we lose track of our selves. We dissolve. And yet… spirituality emerges from consciousness and the material brain. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a sense of self, an "I-ness" distinct from the rest of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a thing centered on self creates a thing absent of self…"

And when we really are dissolved, when the material brain and body have dispersed their atoms and no trace of ego and self remains? What then?

"The atoms in my body will remain, only they will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment. Some will once have been part of my hand. If I could label each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air. And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people. So, we are literally connected to the stars, and we are literally connected to future generations of people. In this way, even in a material universe, we are connected to all things future and past." Alan Lightman, cited by Maria Popova 

That's simply the spiritual core of Darwinian evolution, raised to cosmic proportions. "We are literally connected to the stars" and "to future generations..."

AI "changes everything"

"I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is..." Ezra Klein

“...as A.I. continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.”

This is an inversion of centuries of thought, O’Gieblyn notes, in which humanity justified its own dominance by emphasizing our cognitive uniqueness. We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals but not, so far, with A.I. “If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,” she writes... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/chatbots-artificial-intelligence-future-weirdness.html?smid=em-share

Q-&-A

We're back. What a fine Spring Break in the sun it was, in Arizona! 

And what a reality-check, to come home to this morning's hard freeze. But as James William Buffett said, you've got to take the weather with you wherever you go.

In Experience class tonight we face a fascinating convergence of topics: conversion, de-conversion, shifting dynamic centers of personal energy, Darwinian spirituality, an "arch of experience"...

So let's see if I can answer some of my own questions. 

• Have you experienced a significant (de-)conversion? What precipitated it? How did it change you? Not exactly, but in retrospect I suppose I did have something like a conversion experience when I discovered philosophy. Nothing very specific stands out as the instigating trigger, just a growing sense that my undergrad academic studies in poli-sci were shedding more heat than light. Reading Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Philosophy had a lot to do with that dawning recognition, alongside Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection. A few years earlier I'd stopped going to my family's Southern Baptist church, but full de-conversion awaited my encounter with the language and critical spirit of philosophy.
• Do you interpret "soul" in an "ontological sense" (as naming an existing and self-subsistent entity) or do you prefer to describe it in some other "phenomenal" terms (like Buddhists and Humians)? What do you think of Michael Shermer's definition of soul as a pattern of information"? I agree with Shermer, "whether there is an afterlife or not, we must live as if this is all there is. Our lives, our families, our friends, our communities (and how we treat others) are more meaningful when every day, every moment, every relationship and every person counts." So, soul to me means living in the shadow of finitude and realizing that I must take nothing and no one for granted. All things must pass. 
• How would you characterize "the habitual center of your dynamic/personal energy"? That's Jamesian language for what I usually call enthusiasm or "delight," the ideas that are "hot" and animating for me, the "things that make life worth living"... I made this list a long time ago, I still  stand by it: baseball, Beatles, beer, Britain... and I should have added the idea of evolution as a natural-historical unfolding of some of the implicit possibilities of life. And that brings us to the next question,
• Do you agree that Darwin was a great spiritual teacher? Why don't more of us appreciate the "grandeur" in the evolutionary view of all life as inextricably related? I do! We're all related! And at least here in the south, the grandeur is muted by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Darwin was not a Social Darwinist. He was not a militant atheist. He was a methodical scientist who saw the deep spiritual significance of life's universal relatedness. 
• Have you had a recurrent experience of anything like Darwin's sandwalk? Every morning, every day. You've got to walk your path, if you want to think your best thoughts.
• What do you think it would be like to stand under an Arch of Experience, "a way for us to really feel what it's like to be the other"? It would be a revelation, or rather an unending series of revelations. It would be like firing one after another volley from the POV gun. It would be the greatest civilizing, empathy-awakening force we could possibly know. It just might end the NRA.

Unfrozen

Spring Break is over, ours was excellent and I've left a big piece of my heart in the Cactus. Trying, though, to hang onto some of that warm, dry desert feeling. Take the weather with you, as the noted philosopher  James William Buffett said--"freeze warning" notwithstanding.

  

 

The experience of art

The Power of Art in a Political Age
Searching for beauty as the world turns ugly.

...Artists generally don't set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?

First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In "The Sovereignty of Good," the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that "virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is."

Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven't learned a new fact, but you've had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "The listener to Mozart's Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain."

These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.

Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso's "Guernica" is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn't represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it... David Brooks

The experience of poetic attention

The Art of Noticing – and Appreciating – Our Dizzying World

The poet Jane Hirshfield invites us to embrace the habits of a poetic mind — and observe the beauty that unfolds.

"Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship," the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, "I know something new and I have been changed."

Hirshfield is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and two illuminating essay collections about what poetry does to us and in the world: "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry" and "Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World." Her book "Ledger" is one I gift to people most often. Hirshfield's true talent as a poet is her singular ability to imbue the ordinary, the invisible, the forgotten with a sense of majesty and wonder. Her work is littered with lines that force you to stop, to slow down, to notice what you might have missed or overlooked.

[You can listen to this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

"No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us"

And that's the truth!

 I'm pleased to see John Stuhr's new book (and the little shout-out on p. 47). Subtitle: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism (OUP '23)...

Meliorism makes life worth living?

 Maybe, say WJ and JJM. Surely, say I. 

And in fact, WJ elsewhere--citing Emerson--is far less equivocal on the subject. 

"Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in 
snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities... 
--On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

The conclusion of the late John J. McDermott's essay "Why Bother: Is Life Worth Living?", referenced in the Overthink podcast's latest edition:

THE JOURNEY: AMELIORATION AS NECTAR

Some decades ago, an unusual refrain was heard over and over as

part of a political campaign. After a litany of problems and afflic-

tions, Robert Kennedy would say that "we can do better." This is

hardly the stuff of rhetorical flourish, and, yet, the use of the word

'better' is a very important choice, for it replaces all of those halcyon

words; cure, resolution, and those metaphors of comfort, as in to

straighten out things, make everything whole, all on the way to a

great society and a new world order. Unfortunately, these are the

seeds of cynicism, for as I look over the wreckage of the human

historical past, I see no hope for any resolution of anything humanly

important.

This baleful perspective does not, however, obviate other re-

sponses such as healing, fixing en passant, rescuing, and yes, mak-

ing, doing, and having things better. These approaches are actions

on behalf of metaphysical amelioration, which holds that finite crea-

tures will always be up against it and the best that we can do is to do

better.

Yes, I acknowledge that the strategy of amelioration is vacant of

the ferocious energizing that comes with commitment to an absolute

cause, ever justifiable for some, somewhere, in spite of the nefarious

results that most often accompany such political, religious, and so-

cial self-righteousness. A moral version of the maxim of Camus,

cited above, would read, can I believe in helping when, sub specie

aeternitatis, I hold that there is no ultimate resolution. Put differ-

ently, the original meaning of the ancient medical maxim, primum

non nocere, was to do no harm. How and why did the maxim come

to mean, keep the patient alive, at all cost, including the cost of

dignity? What is it about us that cannot abide the sacrament of the

moment as we reach for a solution, an end game, an explanation, a

cure, nay, immortality?

I try as hard as I can to believe that the nectar is in the journey

and not in its final destination. I stand with T.S. Eliot, who warns

that "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

Perhaps I can describe my philosophical position as a Stoicism with-

out foundation. Walt Whitman says it for me better than I can say it

for myself. "The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred

affections, they scorn the best I do to relate them."

For what it is worth, and that, too, is a perilous question, I now

believe, shakily, insecurely and barely, that life is worth living!

JOHN J. MCDERMOTT