Faith, hope, gratitude, decency: James Earl Carter, 1924-2024

Has there been a more admirable, estimable, and under-valued public figure in our time than Jimmy Carter? Every semester, I talk about him in class as the anti-Machiavelli (and obviously the anti-Trump).

"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity." [HCR]

If this decency and quiet strength came from his enduring faith, a Jamesian pragmatic pluralist must applaud its value for living. Fruits, not roots. “I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death. I’m going to live again… Faith in something is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.”

And yet, I have to say I’m even more impressed by those whose decency flows not from belief in everlasting life but from recognition of its finitude. That’s the value, to me, of a humanistic sensibility. 

My form of faith, I’ve been told. 

I’m not sure faith is the right word, though. I prefer hope. And gratitude. “What a precious privilege, to be alive…”

We are, as Dawkins said, lucky to get to die. We got to live. The great challenge is to live well. Jimmy did.

I think he had plenty of hope and gratitude too. Whatever the deepest roots of his exemplary life, its fruits will continue to inspire. We need to hold that example before us in the years just ahead. We're going to need it.

The fragment novel

"...William Gass complained about the effects of the American penchant for simplicity on the country’s writing, so often reduced to the meat and potatoes of straightforward storytelling. In the contemporary fragment novel, the inverse has occurred. What a plainly narrated adventure was to Gass’s pioneers, a performance of profundity is to the fragment novelist. Oracularities, the more muddled and gently elegiac the better, are offered as evidence of sophistication. “Can you think of writing as a gaze?” the narrator of Drifts asks her students. “Maybe writing was about being visible when I felt invisible,” she reflects later. “Or maybe writing was about becoming invisible again after having become too visible. Maybe it was both. I wasn’t sure anymore.” Zambreno comes close to clarifying that her method hinges on her resistance to clarity—though of course the method itself rebuffs clarification. “One of the notes I take that spring: ‘vagueness.’ Another: ‘signs,’” she writes. Maybe what this means is that vagueness is a sign of poignance, but then it is not altogether clear what it means. After all, why think when you can mimic thinking? And why write a novel when you can meditate on the difficulty of writing a novel? Fragment novels are in effect reflections on novels that, by their own admission, their authors never end up finishing: “What prevents me from writing the book?” asks the protagonist of Drifts. “The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense,” and so on and on. It is less a novel than a gesture at a novel. At first glance, the fragment novel’s structural equivocations about how its pieces hang together and substantive equivocations about all its internal architecture appear antithetical to two of the declutterer’s foremost tics: her allergy to euphemism and her request that everything be stashed in its proper place. But in fact the novel’s studied evasiveness is the product of its commitment to tabling wants and honoring needs, in accordance with the minimalist’s most cherished directive. There is no plot, no food, no friends, and very little dialogue. Perhaps the fragment novel is not in fact constructed by way of removal, but it might as well be, for it is no more than an accumulation of negations."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess": https://a.co/caQ5YMc

Mediation 2.0: “the User Experience”

Still finding enough non-toxicity on Threads to exclude my current feed from the general "social media"-bashing that's become fashionable lately. Deleting "X" was therapeutic. But this has my attention (it would have John Lachs's attention too):

"…Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual. 

There was no deliberate effort to incentivize this way of living, although many individuals and companies have profited from our growing enthusiasm for ever more mediated experiences. It is one of the unintended consequences of the bargain we struck in embracing the Internet, a consequence few wanted to contend with at the beginning because it seemed unduly pessimistic. Besides, the new online world was fun. It still is. 

But what began as a slow bleed of reality on the edges has now become a culture-wide destabilizing force. Reality has competition, from both augmented and alternative forms. The charm of Second Life, an early alternative online world, has given way to the vastly more ambitious, live-your-life-entirely-online ambitions of the Metaverse or the implant-the-Internet-in-your-brain proposals of Elon Musk's Neuralink. 

In these new worlds, we are Users, not individuals. We are meant to prefer these engineered User Experiences to human reality. This book argues that we arrived here by allowing valuable human experiences to wither or die, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Our continued unwillingness to account for what has been lost won't lead to a world of technology-enabled progress; rather, this inability to grapple with the extinction of fundamental human experiences creates a world where our sense of shared reality and purpose is further frayed, and where a growing distrust of human judgment will further polarize our culture and politics. Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last twenty years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature. The guiding spirit of Instagram isn't Rumi. It's Hobbes. 

What kind of person is formed in an increasingly digitized, mediated, hyperconnected, surveilled, and algorithmically governed world? What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience? 

The human condition is embodied, recognizes its fragility, frequently toggles between the mediated and unmediated, requires private spaces, and is finite. By contrast, the User Experience is disembodied and digital, it is trackable and databased and usually always mediated. It lacks privacy and promises no limits—even after death, when, as several new technologies promise, our digital remnants can be gathered and engineered into posthumous chatbots to comfort our grieving family members…"

— The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
https://a.co/encs4XN

Defending experience against 'philosophy'

 

Feeling It Out

Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”

Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.

The New Yorker 

For the record, though, my own experience remains the backbone of my atheistic humanism.

He’d be 96 today

And the little guy's catching up.

James C. Oliver, 1928-2008

James P. Oliver, 1957-

The light will win

Though possibly not in the present.

This was a good and timely holiday read.

"What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.

I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea. I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.

There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win." Creation Lake: A Novel by Rachel Kushner

What a way to go

"In the bedroom of his Parisian home, Bergson had been in a coma for twelve hours. Those who witnessed his agony sensed that the end was near when, all of a sudden, the illustrious philosopher began to speak. He gave a lecture, a philosophy lecture, for an hour. He pronounced the words very distinctly. His sentences were clear. His lucidity overwhelmed those who listened to him. And then he said, “Gentlemen, it is five o’clock. Class is over.” And he expired."

"Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" by Emily Herring: https://a.co/gtbzIIx

a good lamp

"…Ours is a multifarious culture, peopled by many kinds of readers and many more kinds of non-readers, and that's exactly as it should be in a big, loud, messy democracy. Some of y'all are out there taking heart from cozy mysteries or Victorian novels or Mary Oliver's poems. Some of you are consoled by seed catalogs or travel brochures or Americana records or old Peanuts comic strips. Maybe you're one who needs them all, in endless combinations, just to get through these dark nights.

…if you have not yet found a source of solace that makes the long winter nights feel shorter, or at least not quite so dark, then turn off the machines and set your chair next to a good lamp…

Margaret Renkl

http://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/opinion/reading-novellas-short-novels.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Sleep on it: Khan on the unconscious and AI

Our brains may have more in common with large language models than we may want to believe.

"...Artificial intelligence is not human, no matter how much it approximates being human. Regardless of how well it conveys intelligence, personality, and creativity, it is not a sentient, perceiving being.

Yet it is important to appreciate that much of the work we credit to our brain isn’t really sentient or part of our perception. Most of our brain’s activity is subconscious, including what we would often consider creativity. Any artist will tell you they often feel a flash of insight that leads to the creative act.

Similarly, how many times have you been told to “sleep on the problem”? I myself am a master of this art. In college, when I faced seemingly intractable math problems, I would engage with them for a few minutes and then delegate them to my subconscious. I would tell my brain to essentially come up with the answers and tell “me” when it was done. Most of the time, I had the answers by the next morning without having to consciously struggle with them. I’m not alone in doing this. Many people find it a useful way to approach difficult problems.

I now do the same thing when I face a tough problem while leading Khan Academy. I have faith that my brain, or someone else’s, will come up with a creative solution by morning. What are our brains doing subconsciously while our consciousness waits for an answer? Clearly, when you “sleep on a problem,” some part of your brain continues to work even though “you” aren’t aware of it. Neurons activate, which then activate other neurons depending on the strength of the synapses between them. This happens trillions of times overnight, a process mechanically analogous to what happens in a large language model. When a plausible solution presents itself, the subconscious then surfaces it to the conscious as a flash of insight.

Meditation gives us direct experience with this. Close your eyes for a few minutes and observe your own thoughts. They really begin to feel very much like the output of a large language model—or several competing models—whose latest output gets fed as input for the next iteration of output. With a bit of practice, your conscious mind can temporarily disassociate itself from these thoughts until you experience stillness or “no thought.” You’ll begin to see your thoughts for what they are and aren’t. They aren’t you.

Think about a flow state that most experts in their craft can attain after the often-noted ten thousand hours of practice (which is analogous to pretraining for generative AI models). They will often say that their greatest creativity or actions occur when they do not allow themselves to be conscious of what they are doing. The best way to ruin their performance, or creativity, is to consciously think about what is happening. Great orators will tell you that it feels like their brain is doing the talking while their conscious selves are just there to observe the output. After making thousands of videos, I often feel this way when I press record. I won’t claim that what experts’ well-trained brains are doing when they create is identical to what large language models do, but it seems awfully similar."

"Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)" by Salman Khan: https://a.co/i8LPsmB

Against specialisation

Academic philosophers these days don't tend to think like young Bergson.

"The young Bergson's aversion to specialisation had started at some point in the late 1870s, when he discovered that, unlike other academic disciplines, philosophy was not limited to a specific object but opened up an infinity of theoretical avenues. It represented an opportunity to encompass all areas of knowledge, to look at the biggest, most important problems, to embrace every aspect of reality in one sweeping gesture. By choosing philosophy, he would not have to abandon any of his interests but could keep them all under investigation. Conceivably, Bergson had also realised in that moment that mathematical problems, though fascinating, were too narrow for his intellectual ambitions. By specialising as a mathematician, he would be willingly cutting himself off from whole areas of human knowledge, whereas, as a philosopher, the entirety of human knowledge would be his subject matter."

— Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring

https://a.co/d5qCnO6

The unrestricted circle of humanity

Not many philosophers enter that circle anymore. 

There was indeed something special about the way the professor spoke. He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general.” --Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring: https://a.co/2HY2Lu3

Serious

"It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world." —Mary Oliver, Invitation

English heritage

That ubiquitous internet attribution to Ben Franklin of the line that beer is proof that God loves us is surely apocryphal.

"His (London) colleagues nicknamed him the Water-American because he refused to partake in the ubiquitous beer drinking: a pint before breakfast, with breakfast, after breakfast, with the midday meal, at six, and a last one before bed. (Franklin preferred Madeira.) Franklin also prided himself on healthy habits…"

— The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss

The point of trying

Meliorists know: the point is to try.

"…In the aftermath of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate-denying party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to keep going. Every effort feels Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the outrageously unqualified industry toadies whom Donald Trump has named to run the agencies that protect our wilderness, our air, our water. Our future.

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying?

Recently I read an old essay by the Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing for more than six decades about the need to heal the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope," which appears in his book "What Are People For," Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by whether it changes the world in the way we hope it will.

'Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come," he wrote in 1990. "If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.'

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others.

Men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the vote. White Southerners did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. Those things happened, if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.

But where preserving biodiversity is concerned, we don’t have years. Where stabilizing the climate is concerned, we don’t have years. Once a species becomes extinct, it remains extinct forever. Once the climate hits an irreversible tipping point, it will tip. In that context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is hard to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.

So I am taking comfort from Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of ceaseless protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century called “Against Killing Children”). Even at 90, he is not asking himself what the point is...."

—Margaret Renkl, How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark

Good mornings

Cutting back on social media, but not on sunrises and morning saunters...

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The Surprising Allure of Ignorance

"…Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it's not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/ignorance-knowledge-critical-thinking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Better times

Moving beyond the end…

"No wonder there is no lack of prophets who prophesy the early eclipse of our civilization. I am not one of these pessimists; I believe that better times are coming."

— The World As I See It (1934) by Albert Einstein
https://a.co/f9qt4Pe

The world as he saw it

"...The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

Society and Personality

WHEN WE SURVEY our lives and endeavours we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society.

The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave. A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities. And yet such an attitude would be wrong.

It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine-each was discovered by one man. Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society-nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion..."

"The World As I See It" by Albert Einstein: https://a.co/ck9RjxZ

Ritualization

"…once our acts have crystallized into a fixed routine, they may keep evolving, taking on symbolic significance and adding layers of meaning to our actions — this is called "ritualization." We can think of rituals as routines with a significant symbolic load… Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers."

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-hidden-powers-of-everyday-rituals/

Happy Thanksgiving

The gratitude holiday. I just reread Oliver Sacks on the subject. He was defiantly grateful in the face of his late-life cancer diagnosis. In “My Own Life” he channeled David Hume and extolled an attitude of “detachment” that my own father (James C. Oliver, 1928-2008) also used to recommend. It fits our moment:

“This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.”

I’d like to feel that way too. It’d be easier if we could forget who’s about to recover the nuclear football. Really forget him. But the gifted young people in my Honors classes this semester have given me the same reassurance.

I made my annual Thanksgiving Eve trek down the Trace to Hohenwald yesterday, to fetch brother-in-law home for the holiday. It was an exceedingly pleasant trip, coming and going, sharing the Parkway (with its 50 mph limit) with just a few drivers, cyclists, and runners. Most repetitive rituals are, eventually, aren’t they? Especially when coupled with the thought, harder to suppress with each passing year, that for all we know it could be the last. 

Anyway, this is a fine holiday. Younger Daughter and her fiancé will be here soon, the house will be filled with the pleasant familiar old aromas and stories and parades etc. We’ll be appropriately grateful for all we have and try not to dwell on what (and who) is missing. 

I’m going to go now and pull Lay of the Land off the shelf and share some of Frank Bascombe’s gratitude too.

“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. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.”― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

 

It's not all hooey, as my father more sagely understood. It's good to be grateful and know it. Clap your hands. Doff your cap. Swing.*

*I met the Hawk in Ottawa a few years ago, at the Baseball Conference. What a nice man. Like the philosophers--Socrates, Cicero, Montaigne et al--who think their vocation is about learning to die, he got into the mortality business himself when his playing days were through. But I think he also always understood that the meaning of life is to live.

World’s oldest man dead at 112

Mr Tinniswood previously told the BBC he been "quite active as a youngster" and did "a lot of walking", but said he had no idea why he was blessed with such longevity. He insisted he was "no different" to anyone else, adding: "You either live long or you live short - and you can't do much about it."

https://c.im/@BBC/113548787978016155

A fable for our times

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

— Aesop (620 - 564 BCE)

https://www.threads.net/@philosophybreak/post/DChL0Htsk1P?xmt=AQGz6zzarHuPe1ao_k2S_5l0w0H5Cdf-scO6igj7B17A5g

Ancient Greece via AI, “whispers of philosophers”

Cool tool. But I don't know any philosophers who whisper.

"They say true AGI will need to move us emotionally. Yet here I am, touched watching this AI-generated glimpse into ancient Greece circa 375 BC by cinAIma films. The bustling agoras, whispers of philosophers (watch with sound!), the echoing footsteps on marble are all brought to life. 

It's pretty remarkable how technology can bridge 2,400 years and in all honesty there's something profoundly human about using future's tools to understand the past."

https://www.threads.net/@marilynika/post/DCkE1PiSzAi?xmt=AQGzUwvOsYJFq3xMFFxPX32ZE5m036gIUvsIUmmZUeXBPQ

e

Yeah, sure

Wendell’s peace

It helps to recall that wildness preserves the world. A world, anyway.

Samantha Harvey’s ‘beautiful and ambitious’ Orbital wins Booker prize | Books | The Guardian

"Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/12/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-booker-prize-2024

Against Panic: A Survival Kit

"…What this election has made absolutely, indisputably clear should have been clear to me all along: I will be fighting for the rest of my life to preserve the promise this country still holds for pluralism, for fairness, for decency, for true freedom. I am never going to breathe a sigh of relief. What choice is there but to fight?

…So for me there will be more watchful stillness. More walks in the woods to watch the still heron standing one-legged in the shallows; to watch the still deer, waiting to see if I mean them harm; to watch the stillness of the red-eared sliders, resting on the sunny log, and the stillness of the wood duck, whose stillness is on the surface only; to linger in the stillness of the lake itself, a perfect mirror giving back the sky.

There will be more books and more poetry and more time with friends and more afternoons sitting on a bench and watching the leaves fall. I will be fighting with all that I am, but I will also be reminding myself again and again not to wait for the world to give me a reason to sigh with relief. I will give myself respite. I will remember not to keep waiting for sweetness and rest to arrive on their own.

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all,” Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet.” I’ll remember that, too."
…
Margaret Renkl

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margaret.renkl

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It’s just all I’ve got.

It’s plenty. Thanks for finding the right words again. As William James said, life is no game of private theatricals. “It feels like a fight.” We must be meliorists. But we’re more fit for the fight after a walk in the woods, a talk on the porch, a trip to Parnassus. We’ll go on.

Vonnegut

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/DCOso05oh3Z?xmt=AQGz8mUJLUXUeejaBs-wsK0zkmtw2EsmkQLDcPx1HngX7A

Nick Kristof’s Manifesto for Despairing Democrats

Lots of sound counsel here. For instance,

7. I will care for my mental health. There'll be many, many times in the next four years when we'll be irritated, anxious and alarmed, probably with good reason, so we need to find a way to relax and mellow out. For me, that's backpacking and making wine and cider. In my day job, I shout at the world, and it pays no attention, so it's a relief to raise grapes and apples and have them listen to me. And remember that sometimes the best therapist has four legs. A few years ago, many families got a pandemic dog, and for some this may be time to get a Trump dog.

...

nyt

Good advice from Einstein too (except for not reading newspapers):

Contemplate something else

I don't blame the universe, in fact there's solace for this electoral debacle in the cosmic perspective.

But Russell was right, it's no use dwelling on the "less agreeable characteristics" of the world we wake to this morning. Time to walk it off, and then get on with continuing the perennial fight for happiness and justice for all.

Sisyphus is happy.

"I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead…. reason lays no embargo upon happiness; nay more, I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live." — The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight..." --The Dilemma of Determinism, William James

It does feel like a fight. Kamala was a joyful warrior. Meliorists aim to be joyful warriors. We can be, so long as we remember to take our regularly revitalizing moral holidays.