Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Saturday, October 28, 2023
"When am I done being good?"
http://dlvr.it/Sy4T81
"The poem of the future"
A poem of a possible future. We can do better. Or at least try.
The poem of the future will be smaller.
It will fit in the palm of your hand,
on your wrist, in your ear...
..."Pulvis et umbra sumus."*
--J.R. Solanche
* We are dust and shadows-Horace [and according to Google's Generative AI search engine, that may be an allusion to Plato's cave]... seems also to be a popular tattoo, with people whose self-esteem we might question.
"When Am I Done Being Good?"
Never, says the author of Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help. And that can be exhausting.
But, I say, we can be done, over and over again throughout our lifetimes, with being exhausted and fully spent from the effort of living and fighting for justice, decency, honesty, mutual compassion etc. etc.
That’s what William James meant by moral holidays, the delightful atelic stretches when we detach from our projects, live in the moment, and renew ourselves before returning to the telic struggle. "I just TAKE my moral holidays," says James, for the most practical of reasons: I NEED them. They're good for us!
There are countless ways to take a moral holiday, depending on your personal nature and predilections. Watching the World Series (and reading about it, thanks to my wife's recent gift of Tyler Kepner's book) is one of mine. (Last night's Game 1 was thrilling and, uncannily, twelve years to the day since David Freese demoralized the Rangers in the 11th inning of Game 6.)
We’re about to pick up Life is Hard again, in my Intro classes. Students these days do seem to be finding everyday life, routine social encounters, and general uncertainty about the future (well, more the present in fact) pretty hard to handle. Setiya's philosophy can help. James's too. Walk it off.
“...we are never done with justice or with human need; we are never done with other people, with compassion or respect; and we never get to exhale, gratefully, ‘I am done with being good.’” Kieran Setiya
But, I say, we can be done, over and over again throughout our lifetimes, with being exhausted and fully spent from the effort of living and fighting for justice, decency, honesty, mutual compassion etc. etc.
That’s what William James meant by moral holidays, the delightful atelic stretches when we detach from our projects, live in the moment, and renew ourselves before returning to the telic struggle. "I just TAKE my moral holidays," says James, for the most practical of reasons: I NEED them. They're good for us!
There are countless ways to take a moral holiday, depending on your personal nature and predilections. Watching the World Series (and reading about it, thanks to my wife's recent gift of Tyler Kepner's book) is one of mine. (Last night's Game 1 was thrilling and, uncannily, twelve years to the day since David Freese demoralized the Rangers in the 11th inning of Game 6.)
We’re about to pick up Life is Hard again, in my Intro classes. Students these days do seem to be finding everyday life, routine social encounters, and general uncertainty about the future (well, more the present in fact) pretty hard to handle. Setiya's philosophy can help. James's too. Walk it off.
Friday, October 27, 2023
HCR on NRA
Yet another predictably enervating mass shooting in America, in yet another undeserving "special place." History judges.
"…Maine governor Janet Mills has personal ties to Lewiston, where she worked, met her late husband, and sent their daughters to school. "Lewiston is a special place," she wrote today. "It is a closeknit community with a long history of hard work, of persistence, of faith, of opening its big heart to people everywhere.
"I love this place, just as I love our whole state with my entire heart. I am so deeply saddened. This city did not deserve this terrible assault on its citizens, on its peace of mind, on its sense of security. No city does. No state. No people."
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-26-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
"…Maine governor Janet Mills has personal ties to Lewiston, where she worked, met her late husband, and sent their daughters to school. "Lewiston is a special place," she wrote today. "It is a closeknit community with a long history of hard work, of persistence, of faith, of opening its big heart to people everywhere.
"I love this place, just as I love our whole state with my entire heart. I am so deeply saddened. This city did not deserve this terrible assault on its citizens, on its peace of mind, on its sense of security. No city does. No state. No people."
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-26-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thursday, October 26, 2023
Growing up takes courage
And luck—the luck of a wise and timely uncle-figure, portly or otherwise, who'll teach you something about meliorism in the real world. Susan Neiman is herself such a (non-portly) figure in "Why Grow Up…"—
"Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned–principally through the experience of watching others use it well–but it cannot be taught. Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is not only required to learn how to trust your own judgement rather than relying on your state's, your neighbour's or your favourite movie star's. (Of course, your state, your neighbour or your favourite movie star may often be right, and good judgement requires you to recognize that.) Even more important, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two–without giving up on either one.
Most of us are tempted to give up on one or the other. People who stick to the dogmas of childhood can spend whole lifetimes denying that the world does not conform to beliefs they hold dear. While examples of these abound–certain preachers and politicians come to mind–in our day it's more common to meet people who are stuck in the mire of adolescence. The world turns out not to reflect the ideas and ideals they had for it? All the worse for ideals. Maintaining ideals in a world that seems to have no use for them becomes a source of disappointment, even shame. Far better to jettison them entirely than to suffer the memory of hope defeated; far braver to face the depth of the rot of reality than to cling to what turned out to be illusion.
Such a standpoint is less brave than you think, for it demands absolutely nothing but an air of urbanity. Far more courage is needed to acknowledge that both ideals and experience make equal claims on us. Growing up is a matter of respecting those claims and meeting them as best you can, knowing you will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. If you live long enough, each will probably tempt you. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to. If you happen to have a portly uncle who taught you that, you are very lucky."
— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/3JsvawU
"Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned–principally through the experience of watching others use it well–but it cannot be taught. Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is not only required to learn how to trust your own judgement rather than relying on your state's, your neighbour's or your favourite movie star's. (Of course, your state, your neighbour or your favourite movie star may often be right, and good judgement requires you to recognize that.) Even more important, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two–without giving up on either one.
Most of us are tempted to give up on one or the other. People who stick to the dogmas of childhood can spend whole lifetimes denying that the world does not conform to beliefs they hold dear. While examples of these abound–certain preachers and politicians come to mind–in our day it's more common to meet people who are stuck in the mire of adolescence. The world turns out not to reflect the ideas and ideals they had for it? All the worse for ideals. Maintaining ideals in a world that seems to have no use for them becomes a source of disappointment, even shame. Far better to jettison them entirely than to suffer the memory of hope defeated; far braver to face the depth of the rot of reality than to cling to what turned out to be illusion.
Such a standpoint is less brave than you think, for it demands absolutely nothing but an air of urbanity. Far more courage is needed to acknowledge that both ideals and experience make equal claims on us. Growing up is a matter of respecting those claims and meeting them as best you can, knowing you will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. If you live long enough, each will probably tempt you. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to. If you happen to have a portly uncle who taught you that, you are very lucky."
— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/3JsvawU
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
A dream? Or a vision?
The conclusion of "News from Nowhere"—
"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.
Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?
All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."
Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."
— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
https://a.co/0MkT3QW
"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.
Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?
All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."
Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."
— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
https://a.co/0MkT3QW
Why Grow Up
http://dlvr.it/Sxwx9c
The scarier status quo
… It's not that electric vehicles can't catch on fire—they can, and we should of course be prepared to deal with it. But relative to the status quo it's a much smaller problem in every way. (Carbon Brief has a superb takedown of this and 20 other myths about EVs).
And relative to the status quo is how we should judge things, not relative to some standard of perfect safety. So, yes, windmills can kill birds. But a very small number compared to other things (cats, tall buildings, wires); in fact, new data from MIT shows that fossil fuel kills 27 times more birds per unit of energy produced than wind turbines. And the gravest danger to birds by far is the rapid heating of the planet (read Adam Welz' superb new book The End of Eden), which windmills will help forestall. So it makes no sense to oppose windmills on these grounds—you might suggest a few migration corridors where we should avoid siting them, but only in the context of building more somewhere else. Similarly, whales and offshore turbines: the data indicates no great threat, and other data makes abundantly clear that the use of fossil fuels, which windmills displace, is heating and acidifying the ocean in which whales must live. If nothing else, 40 percent of the world's ship traffic is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth; think of the cetacean paradise if we eliminated that.
Psychologists have done their best to explain why we're more scared of possible dangers from new things than obvious dangers from old ones ("this reaction may have to do with our amygdala, which research suggests plays a role in detecting novelty as well as processing fear"), and marketers have done their best to exploit it. But the rest of us have to do our best to fight it in ourselves and others.
A good and pertinent example: there's been a lot of fear and angst about the new mining for metals like lithium and cobalt required for the clean energy transition. In one sense this is useful: as we move into this new endeavor, we should take all the steps we can to make it clean and humane. But mining always comes with some damage, and so will this. The question is, relative to what? It takes orders of magnitude less mining (by one estimate 535 times less) to power the world with renewables than it does with fossil fuel. And breathing the smoke from fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year, one death in five—that's far more than will ever be affected by mining. And it helps short-circuit the rapid warming of earth, which is the deepest threat to the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth.
Social media in particular transmits shocking novelty far more effectively than common sense…
Bill McKibben
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/ignore-that-bomb-someone-lit-a-fire?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
And relative to the status quo is how we should judge things, not relative to some standard of perfect safety. So, yes, windmills can kill birds. But a very small number compared to other things (cats, tall buildings, wires); in fact, new data from MIT shows that fossil fuel kills 27 times more birds per unit of energy produced than wind turbines. And the gravest danger to birds by far is the rapid heating of the planet (read Adam Welz' superb new book The End of Eden), which windmills will help forestall. So it makes no sense to oppose windmills on these grounds—you might suggest a few migration corridors where we should avoid siting them, but only in the context of building more somewhere else. Similarly, whales and offshore turbines: the data indicates no great threat, and other data makes abundantly clear that the use of fossil fuels, which windmills displace, is heating and acidifying the ocean in which whales must live. If nothing else, 40 percent of the world's ship traffic is just carrying coal and oil and gas back and forth; think of the cetacean paradise if we eliminated that.
Psychologists have done their best to explain why we're more scared of possible dangers from new things than obvious dangers from old ones ("this reaction may have to do with our amygdala, which research suggests plays a role in detecting novelty as well as processing fear"), and marketers have done their best to exploit it. But the rest of us have to do our best to fight it in ourselves and others.
A good and pertinent example: there's been a lot of fear and angst about the new mining for metals like lithium and cobalt required for the clean energy transition. In one sense this is useful: as we move into this new endeavor, we should take all the steps we can to make it clean and humane. But mining always comes with some damage, and so will this. The question is, relative to what? It takes orders of magnitude less mining (by one estimate 535 times less) to power the world with renewables than it does with fossil fuel. And breathing the smoke from fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year, one death in five—that's far more than will ever be affected by mining. And it helps short-circuit the rapid warming of earth, which is the deepest threat to the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth.
Social media in particular transmits shocking novelty far more effectively than common sense…
Bill McKibben
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/ignore-that-bomb-someone-lit-a-fire?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Believing in "the continuous life of the world"
"...and consequently we are happy."
Our brief discussion last time in Happiness of Edward Bellamy's late-19th century utopian socialist classic Looking Backward has prompted me finally to pick up its English cousin News from Nowhere by William Morris.
This passage, almost Deweyan in its evocation of the continuous human community, resonates with me:
"More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it.
But that also, with its assured belief in heaven and hell as two countries in which to live, has gone, and now we do, both in word and in deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and as it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of days which our own mere individual experience wins for us: and consequently we are happy."
Did Dewey read Morris? I may have to sign back in to the Dewey Human Nature and Conduct reading group and ask around.
==
https://open.substack.com/pub/philoliver/p/believing-in-the-continuous-life?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Monday, October 23, 2023
Southern Festival of Books
Hadn't been to this annual highlight of autumn in Nashville since pre-pandemic, so I went to the wrong venue, the old one on Legislative Plaza. Fortunately I made it to the big tent at the Bicentennial Mall in time to catch Margaret Renkl. The weather couldn't have been finer. The whole experience was a delight.
Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”
The semi-reclusive cartoonist who said "the days are just packed" (and "treasure" is all around us if we just know where to look) ended his enchanting strip after just a decade— unlike his hero Charles Schulz, who drew Charlie Brown 'til he died.
Did Bill Watterson "grow up"? And does growing up have to be seen as "always a loss"? Questions we're about to address in class with Susan Neiman's "Why Grow Up…" She insists that maturity is enlightenment, if we just know how to approach it.
Anyway, it's always a pleasure to revisit that little boy and his more mature sidekick, who could care less if people called them "a pair of pathetic peripatetics" and who understood the importance of embracing change in all the seasons of life.
"Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, "Ahab-like" by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child. Maybe he chose to stop publishing because, in some way, for whatever reasons, he became O.K. with growing up."
Life After "Calvin and Hobbes"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review
Life After "Calvin and Hobbes"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review
Betraying higher education
"What we do [in the liberal arts] is empower [students] to think about themselves not just as someone who needs a job, but someone who wants to contribute to society," said Ann Kennedy, a gender studies professor at the University of Maine at Farmington whose position was eliminated. "The lesson of the liberal arts is that we can all contribute. And that may not be in your job, it may be in other ways."
West Virginia University Is Everything That's Wrong With Higher Education Today
https://newrepublic.com/article/176202/west-virginia-university-higher-education-enrollment-cliff-cuts
Saturday, October 21, 2023
Selfie culture vs. reflective wisdom
Kieran Setiya on David Samuels: the self-absorption encouraged by social media and instantaneous communications technology may bode ill for the future of reading and, therefore, thinking. But that's been the fear of every new communications technology, so…
https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-42242190?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-42242190?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Nine!
Light is life. I'm grateful for it. And I still sleep way below average.
"It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the idea for a workable electric light…
One of the effects of the invention of the electric light is that people sleep less than they once did. Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night; since then, it's about seven and a half. Sleep researchers have shown in the laboratory that if people are deprived of electric light, they will go back to the nine-hour-a-night schedule."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-da8?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
"It was on this day in 1879 that the inventor Thomas Edison finally struck upon the idea for a workable electric light…
One of the effects of the invention of the electric light is that people sleep less than they once did. Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night; since then, it's about seven and a half. Sleep researchers have shown in the laboratory that if people are deprived of electric light, they will go back to the nine-hour-a-night schedule."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-da8?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Friday, October 20, 2023
John Dewey
"It's the birthday of John Dewey, born in Burlington, Vermont (1859). Regarded as the father of progressive education, his best-known innovation was what he called "learning by directed living," which combined learning with concrete activity. He wrote Democracy and Education (1916), and he founded the New School for Social Research. He was a shy, scholarly youth; a friend said that ideas were like living objects to him, and the only things he was really interested in. When he was hired to teach at the University of Michigan at the age of 25, he constituted the entire philosophy department.
He spent most of his career thinking and writing about education. He said that schools were useless unless they taught students how to live as members of a community; that they wouldn't succeed in teaching children anything unless they were receptive to what children were ready to learn; and that they wouldn't get anywhere unless they treated children as individuals. He once gave a speech at Michigan in which he said there was so much knowledge at universities because the freshmen brought everything they knew to college with them, and the seniors never took anything away."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-october-7dd?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
He spent most of his career thinking and writing about education. He said that schools were useless unless they taught students how to live as members of a community; that they wouldn't succeed in teaching children anything unless they were receptive to what children were ready to learn; and that they wouldn't get anywhere unless they treated children as individuals. He once gave a speech at Michigan in which he said there was so much knowledge at universities because the freshmen brought everything they knew to college with them, and the seniors never took anything away."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-october-7dd?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thursday, October 19, 2023
If You’ve Ever Heard a Voice That Wasn’t There, This Could Be Why
The varieties of hallucinatory experience…
"…There is actually a continuum of these experiences," Dr. Orepic said. "So all of us hallucinate — at certain times, like if you're tired, you'll hallucinate more, for instance — and some people are more prone to do so…"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/science/hearing-voices-hallucination-robot.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
If You've Ever Heard a Voice That Wasn't There, This Could Be Why
If You've Ever Heard a Voice That Wasn't There, This Could Be Why
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
In transition
"… let's just concentrate for a moment on the almost absurd beauty of the idea that we have learned to power the things we need from the rays of a burning orb that lies 93 million miles distant across the vastness of space. Let me provide just a few facts about where we lie right now with that transition..."
Bill McKibben
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/energy-from-heaven?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Bill McKibben
https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/energy-from-heaven?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Monday, October 16, 2023
“A superb demonstration”? -or “a good front”?
The grieving part of him knew the "demonstration" was rooted in delusion:
"James's friend F.W.H. Myers—a year younger than James and already very sick with a bad heart and arteries and an associated respiratory problem called Cheyne-Stokes breathing—contracted double pneumonia and died in Rome on January 17. James wrote Eleanor Sidgwick (the widow of his friend Henry Sidgwick and a close friend of the Myerses) that, instead of the usual sickroom atmosphere of "physical misery and moral suffering," Myers's eagerness to go, and his mental clarity up to the time the death agony began, had been a "superb" thing to see, "a demonstration ad oculos of the practical influence of a living belief in future existence."
James was, in part, putting on a good front. Another glimpse of the effect of Myers's death on James is provided by a young doctor, Axel Munthe, who, along with Baldwin, attended Myers. Munthe says, in The Story of San Michele, that he saw James sitting with notebook and pencil outside the room in which Myers was dying, waiting for some communication from the other side. "When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open notebook on his knees. The page was blank." 8"
— William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
https://a.co/ivqaJpL
"James's friend F.W.H. Myers—a year younger than James and already very sick with a bad heart and arteries and an associated respiratory problem called Cheyne-Stokes breathing—contracted double pneumonia and died in Rome on January 17. James wrote Eleanor Sidgwick (the widow of his friend Henry Sidgwick and a close friend of the Myerses) that, instead of the usual sickroom atmosphere of "physical misery and moral suffering," Myers's eagerness to go, and his mental clarity up to the time the death agony began, had been a "superb" thing to see, "a demonstration ad oculos of the practical influence of a living belief in future existence."
James was, in part, putting on a good front. Another glimpse of the effect of Myers's death on James is provided by a young doctor, Axel Munthe, who, along with Baldwin, attended Myers. Munthe says, in The Story of San Michele, that he saw James sitting with notebook and pencil outside the room in which Myers was dying, waiting for some communication from the other side. "When I went away William James was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open notebook on his knees. The page was blank." 8"
— William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
https://a.co/ivqaJpL
Friday, October 13, 2023
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Heather Cox Richardson with Rebecca Solnit / Democracy Awakening
Two smart meliorists, on the instructive past and hopeful (but insecure) future of democracy
https://youtu.be/SYtE8_f3-oE?si=eaJQb_CijJIEPwRS
https://youtu.be/SYtE8_f3-oE?si=eaJQb_CijJIEPwRS
It’s Eleanor’s birthday
Talk more, worry less: a timely message for our anxious age…
"We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."
And,
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-wednesday-bb7?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
"We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."
And,
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-wednesday-bb7?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Monday, October 9, 2023
“6 Inches”
A poem reminding us there's a time and a place for philosophizing (and sometimes it's best to keep it to yourself)…
https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=10813.html
https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=10813.html
If you don't read fiction because you think it's "fake"...
(Too many students, who seem to have no problem with fictional video games etc., tell me that.)
Sunday, October 8, 2023
A matter of survival
Philip Booth, a Robert Frost protégé, sounds Pragmatic to me: words are for coping, not copying…
"Writing poems is not a career but a lifetime of looking into, and listening to, how words see."
"I think survival is at stake for all of us all the time."
"Every poem, every work of art, everything that is well done, well made, well said, generously given, adds to our chances of survival." —Philip Booth
https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-sunday-october-549?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Saturday, October 7, 2023
Family guy
Hope they'll say about me what Linda said about her dad Neal…
"It's not only older generations whose memories are valuable. If you have siblings, their memories of growing up can enrich your own. If your kids are grown, asking them what they remember about their childhood can give you a new perspective on them and on your own experiences as a parent. Shared memories deepen connections.
The Harvard Study, in a way, is a massive experiment in this kind of family inquiry. When we open up an individual file and get that nostalgic feeling of looking through a family photo album, we do it in the spirit of investigation. But you don't need grant funding and the support of an academic institution to mine the treasures that are there in your own family. It takes only curiosity and time. You might find some surprises, good and bad, that enrich your understanding of your family.
Neal McCarthy's kids took advantage of his memory in this way, and had several conversations with their father about his early life. He didn't tell them everything—not as much, it seems, as he told the Harvard Study—but he told them enough for them to know that he'd had both some great times and some incredibly hard times.
In the end, the most important thing was something they saw firsthand: when he formed a family of his own, he didn't run from challenges, he didn't perpetuate the things that made his childhood hard, and he gave his family the gift of his steady presence. Even if he made mistakes, he didn't turn away from them. He was there. When asked what advice she would give to the future generation, his daughter Linda gave an answer inspired by her father, telling the Study, "I'd just say never forget what this life is truly about. It's not about how much money you make. That's what I learned from my dad. It's about the person he was to me, to my child, my sisters and my brother, his seven grandchildren. If I can be half that I'll be all right.""
— The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert J. Waldinger, Marc Schulz Ph.D
Friday, October 6, 2023
This Nerve Influences Nearly Every Internal Organ. Can It Improve Our Mental State, Too?
"For wellness, try to maintain high vagus nerve activity through mindfulness, exercise and paced breathing"— like I keep saying, long walks…
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/well/mind/vagus-nerve-mental-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
This Nerve Influences Nearly Every Internal Organ. Can It Improve Our Mental State, Too?
This Nerve Influences Nearly Every Internal Organ. Can It Improve Our Mental State, Too?
“We need to fight isolation”
"…I read Anne Frank's diary when I was in high school in Minnesota and I still remember being stunned by 'In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.'
But then I have to google it to get what followed it: "I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."
It still moves me, that a 15-year-old girl locked with her family in an attic in Amsterdam could write such a thing.
Here in America we're locked in our own attics of social media, isolation, working from home, driving the freeways. "People are good at heart" is the basis of civil democracy; it's what allows us to speak decently to those who disagree with us. And we feel this goodness when we walk down the street or go to a ball game or a Taylor Swift concert. We need to fight isolation with festivals, parades, public events, door-to-door campaigning..."
https://open.substack.com/pub/garrisonkeillor/p/what-endures-is-decency-believe-me?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
But then I have to google it to get what followed it: "I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."
It still moves me, that a 15-year-old girl locked with her family in an attic in Amsterdam could write such a thing.
Here in America we're locked in our own attics of social media, isolation, working from home, driving the freeways. "People are good at heart" is the basis of civil democracy; it's what allows us to speak decently to those who disagree with us. And we feel this goodness when we walk down the street or go to a ball game or a Taylor Swift concert. We need to fight isolation with festivals, parades, public events, door-to-door campaigning..."
https://open.substack.com/pub/garrisonkeillor/p/what-endures-is-decency-believe-me?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Senator Butler
It was a day of historic firsts in American politics. Don't overlook this one:
"…while the Republicans were making history on the House side of the U.S. Capitol, the Democrats were making history on the Senate side. Vice President Kamala Harris swore into office Senator Laphonza Butler to complete the term of Senator Dianne Feinstein, which ends next year. Before her nomination, Butler was the president of EMILYs List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic female candidates who back reproductive rights to office, and has advised a number of high-profile political campaigns, including that of Harris in 2020.
Butler is the first Black lesbian in the Senate. She and her wife, Nenike, have a daughter."
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-3-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
"…while the Republicans were making history on the House side of the U.S. Capitol, the Democrats were making history on the Senate side. Vice President Kamala Harris swore into office Senator Laphonza Butler to complete the term of Senator Dianne Feinstein, which ends next year. Before her nomination, Butler was the president of EMILYs List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic female candidates who back reproductive rights to office, and has advised a number of high-profile political campaigns, including that of Harris in 2020.
Butler is the first Black lesbian in the Senate. She and her wife, Nenike, have a daughter."
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-3-2023?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Ban book bans
"...It’s important to note that most Americans — including a majority of Republicans — support teachers and librarians and oppose book bans. The attacks are the work of a minuscule minority of conservatives. When The Washington Post analyzed 986 complaints against specific books filed during the 2021-2022 school year, it found that the majority were issued by the same 11 people. (You read that right. 11.) Across the red states, hundreds of popular titles have been removed from public school and community libraries, in many cases on the basis of a single complaint.
Americans are finally beginning to fight back, and the pushback isn’t coming only from advocacy organizations like the American Library Association and PEN America. Authors and artists are fighting back. Students are fighting back. Parents are fighting back. If everyone who opposes book bans got involved, the whole effort would die overnight. Book banners do not have numbers on their side.
They don’t have reality on their side, either. These days books exist in forms that cannot be reduced to ashes. If your library is no longer allowed to offer a particular title, there’s a good chance you can get it online from the Digital Public Library of America, which just launched an initiative called The Banned Book Club. Banned titles are available through a free e-reader app..."
Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/opinion/book-bans-education-librarians.html?smid=em-share
Monday, October 2, 2023
Wallace Stevens, peripatetic poet
He was one of WJ's students too.
It's the birthday of Wallace Stevens (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). He wanted to be a journalist, but after a couple years of writing for a New York paper, he decided that he would fulfill his father's desires and go to law school. After graduating, he took a job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he was in charge of inspecting surety claims. He would remain at the job for the rest of his life.
Each day, he walked the two miles between his office and upper-middle class home, where he lived with his wife and daughter, and during these walks to and from work, he composed poetry. He said, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job." He would only let people walk with him if they didn't talk. He never ate lunch, except for once a week "to break up the monotony" — and on that day, he would always go to a place near his Hartford, Connecticut, office.
He claimed that "poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem. There's nothing perfunctory about them for each case is different."
His first collection of poems, Harmonium, was published when he was 43 years old. Though the volume received only lukewarm praise at first, it later became considered a modernist classic. In 1955, just months before he died, he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his volume Collected Poems.
In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." And he wrote, "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=10759.htmlMaybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars
Will they be happy to be there?
"We're at a pivotal moment, and in some ways it feels like a dream sequence," said Niki Werkheiser, NASA's director of technology maturation. "In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/realestate/nasa-homes-moon-3-d-printing.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars
Maybe in Your Lifetime, People Will Live on the Moon and Then Mars
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