Splendid health

The steroids are long gone, the Levofloxacin runs out today, but traces of the pneumonia I brought back from KC continue to remind me that breath is life. William James's best advice to his friend Schiller is too true: "Keep your health, your splendid health, it's worth more than all the truths under the firmament."

But we do have other truths to catch up with today. In CoPhi we consider Hegel, Schopenhauer, Mill, and Darwin. Three optimists and one scrooge.

In Atheism, it's on to Lord Russell. His message to the future: "never be diverted by what you wish to believe... love is wise, hatred is foolish. We must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance that is absolutely vital..."

In Bio, Atul Gawande's Being Mortal really hits home.

“In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”

And, did you see Jackie Robinson? Ken Burns has another hit too, continuing tonight. We do need our storytellers and our mortal heroes. "Free minds and hearts at work..."

5:30/6:18, 46/65

Safe at home

Back from my long road trip to Kansas, the Baseball Conference, KC and the Negro Leagues Museum. Good times. Woulda been even better if I'd managed at some point to climb back out from "under the weather," but it's good to be reminded periodically not to take health for granted. (It's Joseph Lister's birthday, a propos of that. His germ theory cut mortality from "ward fever" from 50 to 15 %, and he "lived to see the entire medical community accept and adopt his methods.")

And, it's always good to come safely home. Picked up a rider in Missouri, my sister. She'll be visiting us in Bioethics this afternoon, to talk about health and life in the E.R.

In CoPhi, Kant and Bentham. If a deranged ax-wielder ever comes looking for me, I hope my friends are all utilliatarians and not deontologists.

In Atheism, we finish with Kitcher's measured and respectful Life After Faith before turning next time to Bertrand Russell. Red meat for the non-accommodationists.

5:30/6:29, 40/62

Buck O'Neil

Sick on Easter, the holiday pagans like me celebrate as symbolic of spring and the return of life (whether Eostre existed or not). No fair.

But I wasn't too sick to continue my preparation for this week's conference with two wonderful books.

First, I finally gave overdue attention to Older Daughter's 2010 Christmas gift: We Are the Ship: the Story of Negro League Baseball, with its terrific dedication:

And, the best book about baseball that's really about life that I've read in a long time: The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America makes clear just why old Buck was such an inspiration to so many. My conference presentation started out being about Satchel Paige, on the strength of Buck's testimony that he was deeper than people knew. But it's going to end up more about Buck, who was not only deep with self-knowledge but wide with compassion. He was a humanist, a kind and caring man who seems to have had a Midas touch for the best in people.

When Buck was inexplicably snubbed by Cooperstown, not long before his death at nearly 95, he went there anyway to lead the posthumous induction of seventeen of his old friends. And then he got everybody in the place to hold hands and sing a little refrain about love.

Why wasn't he bitter and resentful over his exclusion, the way most of us would have been? Why didn't he snub Cooperstown? Think about this, son. What is my life all about? He'd led the examined life. He knew.

6:45/6:40, 47/60/39

Joe Garagiola

With the latest report of the NFL's negligence in addressing its brain injury problem, I turn happily to my sport. The 21st Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference is just a week away. It used to happen across the hall, a few steps from my office door. This year it's going to take a little longer to get there, at its new venue 600 miles away in Kansas. But I wouldn't miss it, my surest sign of Spring. I'm especially looking forward to revisiting the Negro Leagues Museum.

In my presentation I'm going to talk about the under-appreciated sagacity of the game's greatest wits, mostly Satchel Paige (who, like Yogi, didn't say everything he said) and Buck O'Neil (who did).

That's a lot of Kansas City, for an old St. Louisan like me, so I'm adding Yogi and his pal Joe Garagiola to the program. He just died at age 90, following his friend who also checked out at 90 in September. I'd love to believe they'll both go on cracking wise on a heavenly Hill somewhere.

It was Joe, to whom Yogi instructed: "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

It was Joe who stoked the legend of Yogi. "Not only was I not the best catcher in the major leagues, I wasn't even the best catcher on my street."

Unlike Yogi, Joe played for lots of teams ("I went through baseball as a player to be named later") including, naturally, the Cubs. "One thing you learned as a Cubs fan: when you bought you ticket, you could bank on seeing the bottom of the ninth."

His debut in the Cardinals broadcast booth with Buck and Caray was a couple of years before my time, but I caught him later on countless Games of the Week, and on the Today show. He came across as a regular guy, genuine, self-effacing, and deceptively simple, an ideal complement for Vin Scully's florid style. “Scully will describe the azure blue skies and the fluffy clouds and Old Glory blowing in center field, and he makes you feel like, ‘Let’s have a parade,’ ” he said. “He can put words together, and I’d come in and say, ‘All I know is the wind is blowing, and if the pitcher doesn’t have a good fastball or can’t spot it, he’ll be backing up third all day.’ ”

He received the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He might have echoed Yogi's pithiest Socratic truth - "In baseball you don't know nothin'" - but he knew plenty.

7:00/6:44, 45/60/39

Now, at last

This morning I'm revisiting an old post from 2010 when my “Future of Life” class considered the Clock of the Long Now, so named by musician Brian Eno. He said: "If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable – gauche, uncivilised – to act in disregard of our descendants." 

Some who resist the kind of long-term thinking that professes deep regard for our distant descendants are put off by what they see as a disingenuous stance of selflessness. 

And some just agree with Philip Kitcher, who said in his 2013 Terry Lectures at Yale that became Life After Faith that it becomes increasingly difficult to muster and maintain intimate interest in the lives of people we'll never know. Never mind people in ten millennia, those coming just a couple generations down the pike are already hard for him to think and care about. "So, as I look forward sufficiently far, regret [at dying and missing the future] declines into indifference."

As noted here a few weeks ago, this is an attitude Samuel Scheffler finds unsustainable and in fact unsustained, when we reflect on the world without us and realize that its indefinite continuation as the natural "collective afterlife" long after we're gone is something most of us can't help caring about.

So, I suggest, we should work on putting our indifference to the distant future behind us. Most of us do want, as Eno said, to contribute to a tenable future. We must keep reminding ourselves that our present was the distant future for our remote ancestors, who fortunately for us did not all regard us indifferently. This is not a call for selflessness, it's an acknowledgement that meaningful selfhood in the present entails a vital relatedness to the selves who came before and those who will come after us. 

==
We’ve got to extend our empathy far forward and gain a new appreciation for the “beautiful continuum of life.” He and his Long Now Foundation compadres (Eno came up with their name) think the best trigger for that transformation may be a new artistry and iconography of time. Stick a clock in a mountain and try to keep it ticking, they say. The trying is the beauty part, and the caring.

Danny Hillis is the earnest computer scientist behind the whole endeavor. Challenged by the late Jonas Salk to acknowledge the ego-driven angle of his passion, he confesses:

OK, Jonas, OK, people of the future, here is a part of me that I want to preserve, and maybe the clock is my way of explaining it to you: I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future.

He wrote that a decade ago, and it would be easy enough to surrender to hopelessness now. But if we did, what would our descendants think of us? (Or… what descendants?) It’s important, as Woody Allen has (with perverse unintended irony) said, to be reasonably well thought-of after we’ve “thinned out.”

Ego does have its uses.

But there are practical problems to face, with this improbable clock.

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5:30/6:45, 64/67/41

Collecting happiness

Today's poem makes the familiar point that our happiness is greatest when we're least attentive to it. Recounting an ordinary domestic scene on the porch in Spring, surrounded by family, sipping coffee, sniffing lilacs, lightly regarding the news, Linda Pastan "didn't even guess that I was happy."

If someone could stop the camera then…
if someone could only stop the camera
and ask me: are you happy?
Perhaps I would have noticed
how the morning shone in the reflected
color of lilac. Yes, I might have said
and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

In Happiness class people often wonder if noticing happiness won't somehow jinx or ruin it. To the contrary, I agree with the poet. If someone could only stop the camera and just ask, noticing might actually amplify that fleeting feeling of well-being.

So, I'm going to start collecting happiness poems. Here's what I've got so far.

Happy Poems

• Billy Collins
• Happiness by Carl Sandburg
• Happiness by Jane Kenyon
• Poem Hunter results
• The Happiest Day by Jane Pastan

7:00/6:47, 56/70

The worm at the core

Once again, the pre-dawn horizon rewards the early riser. What a gorgeous golden moon, hovering just above the neighbors' rooftop, just greeted the dog and me this a.m.

I've come across a book with immediate relevance for all my current classes, especially Atheism & Bioethics: The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life leads with the same epigrammatic William James quote that suggested my own title, way back when, with its "worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight" that "turns us into melancholy metaphysicians." The worm comes from fear, source of so many of our obsessions and compulsions. "The knowledge that we are mortal underlies both the noblest and the most unsavory of human pursuits." If we know this, say the authors, growth and progress can be ours.

Philip Kitcher raises the role of fear in the early and forever-inescapable human ethical project, in today's second chapter of Life After Faith. I of course thought instantly of Brooks' and Reiner's timeless 2,000 Year-Old Man. Carl: What was the means of transportation then? Mel: Mostly fear. Carl: Fear transported you? Mel: Fear, yes. You would see... an animal would growl, you'd go two miles in a minute. Fear would be the main propulsion. 

Not fear per se, but clear-eyed acknowledgement of our fear of dying followed by serious reflection on its place in life, may transport us. Maybe.

Today in CoPhi it's Leibniz and his bête noire Voltaire. James is Voltaire's ally against the Panglossian courtier Leibniz, whom he labelled "superficiality incarnate." One of the hazards of metaphysics is a diluted sense of reality, leading to the appearance at least of dishonesty. Who could ever believe this the best of possible worlds, except someone whose grasp of possibility had been badly stunted by too much thinking?

You know who doesn't think too much? My dog. I was listening to Older Daughter's radio show last night, which developed an animal theme. I texted the suggestion that she close the show with Walt Whitman's paean to animal nature, and she did. "I THINK I could turn and live with animals..."

Jacques Barzun's Stroll With William James, I'm reminded, opens with an anecdote about James calling absent-mindedness a matter of being "present-minded somewhere else." Exactly right! What I've been trying to say about immediacy really boils down to the thought that it can be useful to a person - though possibly not to a dog - to cultivate that kind of presence, occasionally.

On most occasions, it's still probably best to be present where you live. So, Happy birthday Billy Collins, poet-extraordinaire of ordinary life who, like Updike, also "gives the mundane its beautiful due." That may be the best way, most days, to dispatch the worm at the core.

5:30/6:48, 35/69

Generations

I'm struck again by the aptness of John Lachs's Intermediate Man dedication: "For my family... three generations of immediacy." All the more striking, then, are his initial explications of the concept of immediacy as self-reliance in the extreme pre-Friday Crusoe fashion, "in direct and immediate touch with the conditions of his existence," knowing "all that was needed for life" (sans Internet, notice - see previous post on Michael Lynch's "Internet of Us"), depending on no one, at home in his island solitude.

What's striking is that Lachs, with that 1981 dedication, foreshadows a kind of immediacy that looks far beyond the moment to see in a glance the sweep of generational time, and then immediately pulls back from that expansive vision to a more explicitly insular idea.

This recessive adjustment leads him to forswear interest in the remote future, with remoteness understood trans-generationally. Mediation and "psychic distance" result, he says, from the varieties of ways in which the institutions and practices of modern life cut us off from our own direct experience. The few generations it takes to span a century are already too many for our direct attention and interest.

"The greatest immediacy is gained by full physical presence which opens all our senses," followed by the fading presence of visual and auditory stimuli. There's not much more to the future, in these terms, than an even less robust ideational shadow. Barely a presence at all.

William James may be understood to have meant something similar when he said the fons et origo, the fount and origin of life, is perceptual. But a point of origin is only a start.

Emerson extolled self-reliance, wondering why any of us ever settles for less than an "original relation to universe."

Carl Sagan said we're "wanderers" in space and time, irresistibly curious about the remotest reaches of the cosmos, bound to go there imaginatively now and dream of really going, one of these generations.

Teddy Roosevelt said "all for each and each for all."

An original relation to the universe can be inclusive, expansive, and motile. Its present can grow, its moment can last, its island can include countless generations of immediacy.

7:00/6:50, 35/57

The Internet of Us

Vandy's Berry Lecturer Michael Lynch delivered an important message last night about "Google-knowing" and its mediated threat to deep understanding. The more we rely on digital connection to plug our knowledge gaps, the weaker our perceptual acuity. The more we depend on external data storage, the thinner our empirical relation to the world of facts in context, or genuine knowledge. Here's his lively and peripatetic recent introduction to The Internet of Us-Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data:

Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker, says Lynch "thinks we are frighteningly close" to losing our ability to know,

as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

We heard a report in the Atheism class Thursday that seems to me to support this alarming forecast. It was a good and thoughtful report, informed by Google, but ultimately resigned to a world in which competing facts-&-values and alternative local cultures (even cultures as superficially similar as Nashville and St. Louis!) will never be reconciled. The reporters were skeptical about reason's relevance in settling differences, confirming Lynch's "three sources of skepticism about reason: the suspicion that all reasoning is rationalization, the idea that science is just another faith, and the notion that objectivity is an illusion."

Our reporters illustrated their skepticism with a distressing sitcom clip in which a creationist dismisses science's greatest virtue, self-correction, as "lying, sometimes." He concludes, without serious challenge from a room full of supposed Darwinists , that evolution is simply an article of faith and not fact. Lynch's prediction that, imbued with mere Google knowledge, we soon "won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values," is already manifest.

"No matter the bigness of the data, the vastness of the Web, the freeness of speech, nothing could be less well settled in the twenty-first century than whether people know what they know from faith or from facts, or whether anything, in the end, can really be said to be fully proved."

Truthiness is apparently the closest we'll come to knowing, in this strange new world of Drumpf. It's sadder than it is funny, at this point. Remember how we thought, five years ago, that the comic truth of this White House tour de force would finally settle the facts and prove the Donald a liar?

"Googling is Believing: Trumping the Informed Citizen"...

7:00/6:53, 52/53/37

Mundane, beautiful, connected

John Updike had a lovely reply to the question Why write?

To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me [...] a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.

He "gave the mundane its beautiful due.”

George Plimpton, also born on this date, did too.

He was urbane and sophisticated, but like a lot of us he never gave up his little boy enthusiasm for the games of childhood. I met him in Cooperstown, just a couple of years before his death. He talked about how, from the earliest age, he'd been fascinated by the way a masterfully-thrown ball creates a connection between otherwise-discrete points in space. (Hence, Sidd Finch. The baseball conference, btw, is on April Fool's Day again this year.)

Close observation of what it's like to create new connections in space and time, to do that, to experience the doing of it, propelled his various amateur stints as a pretend-professional athlete. Hemingway admired his "dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty” performances (Out of My League, Paper Lion).

And then there's Paris Review, which didn't bother asking why to write but how. The distilled answer: when the words come, catch them. Connect.

7:00/6:54, 40/69

Erin Go Bragh

Cheers, St. Pat, and happy birthday to my little sister.  I didn't know that Patrick's design of the Celtic cross "incorporates the Irish sun god into the Christian symbol." (WA) Or that the pubs in Ireland used to be closed on this "fairly somber" holiday, before Americans (mostly) turned it into an occasion of "boisteroius excess."

Not much boisterous excess in today's CoPhi subject, John Locke. But Bishop Berkeley (speaking of Ireland) was an excessive youth, apparently, if you can believe the story that in his student days he hung himself just to see what it felt like to lose consciousness. He'd already taken esse ist percipi to heart. Not much common sense there, the Scot Thomas Reid would have said.

In Atheism we turn to Philip Kitcher's Life After Faith, his published Terry Lectures delivered eighty years after his hero John Dewey's own Terry Lectures that became A Common Faith. Making the case for "soft atheism," he (like Alain de Botton, with a pragmatic twist) "sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice."

I’m a humanist first and an atheist second. Because I’m more sympathetic to religion than the prominent new atheists, I label my position “soft atheism.” But perhaps I’m a more insidious foe than Dennett and Dawkins. For instead of ignoring important species of religion, I want to prepare the way for their gradual disappearance...

I think religion at its best — the religion that prompts my admiration and sympathy — detaches itself from dubious metaphysics and from speculations about a “transcendent” to which our concepts are surely inadequate. It focuses on human problems, attempting to relieve want and misery, to provide opportunities for worthwhile life, and to deepen and extend important values... The atheism I favor is one in which literal talk about “God” or other supposed manifestations of the “transcendent” comes to be seen as a distraction from the important human problems — a form of language that quietly disappears. 

In Bioethics we take up Eula Biss's On Immunity, a smart and conscientious young mother's attempt to separate wheat from chaff in the vaccination "debate". Of course one must "enact and embody one's beliefs," but what if one's beliefs imperil the public health and safety?

And I'll prompt the class to begin thinking of questions for the birthday girl, who'll be visiting us soon to talk about her experiences as an E.R. social worker.

5:30/6:56, 44/71

Moon Man

“Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace."

Robert Goddard should know.  The New York Times ridiculed his rocket vision, which began for him with  H.G. Wells’ 1898 War of the Worlds. He launched the first liquid-fueled rocket 90 years ago today. "Goddard died of cancer in 1945, 12 years before the Soviet Union successfully launched its Sputnik satellite. After the successful launch of NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft in 1969, the Times printed a retraction of their ridicule of Goddard and his vision." WA

It's too bad Goddard didn't get to enjoy that retraction, but he did get to enjoy a vision that brought the next century into his present. How to balance present enjoyment with due regard for the future, I've been asking? Begin by not squelching, ridiculing, or ignoring dreams and visions. Chris Stevens: "Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon."

Visionaries live with possibility. Why do most of us not? Why are we so reluctant to entertain an unfamiliar vision, so afraid that we might become objects of ridicule? We ought to teach our children to dream, and not fear to commit an error of vision. "Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things," but timidity diminishes us and shrinks our world.  We make ourselves small by denying possibility, and then the joke's on us. "A certain lightness of heart seems healthier," and more likely to shoot the moon.

6:00/6:57, 63/71/44

Saving the world

Our first day back in class after Spring Break, the Ides of March. These breaks always feel paradoxically both long and short. Like life, right? But it wouldn't be a holiday if it didn't end.

Older Daughter's just began. Took her to the airport this time yesterday, she's spending her Spring Break working the South by Southwest fest in Austin and documenting it in Snapchat snatches. Wish we were there for real.

But we're happy to be here, with Pascal and Spinoza in CoPhi, stem cells in Bioethics, and Alain de Botton on our need for beautiful art, architecture, and secular ritual. He says writing books is futile, if you want to change the world. But how can any reader believe that? Of course sharing ideas makes a difference, in the lives of reflective people, and in the long run in every life. We have to believe that.

"Lifelong learners" believe it, and believe in the long run. I'm doing a distillation of the Happiness course in May for our College of Liberal Arts Lifelong Learning program. John Dewey said it pithily and best: "I believe that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." It's never too late to learn, it's always too soon to stop. That's why we write, to learn, teach, and live.

Of course life, like writing, requires nurture and cultivation. Earth Week's coming, to remind us that if we want to save the world we can't just write about it. Bill McKibben knows that. In the long run though, my guess is, his books will be acknowledged as having made as big a difference as anything.

5:30/6:58, 50/84
5:30/7:00/6:52, 60/70/52

Holidays and the future

"The attitude of seeking fulfillment in the future and viewing each present act as means to later joys," John Lachs wrote in Intermediate Man,  "tends to destroy the natural satisfaction that attends the exercise of each of our parts." It's an attitude, he was saying, that deprives us of immediacy and its intrinsic rewards, and encourages us to fret about things far beyond our control. He was already anticipating his own later stance as a pragmatic stoic, who's learned the futility of ceaseless effort directed at outcomes we'll never know or enjoy.

 "Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends."

There's the rub, for me. Of course we owe it to ourselves to enjoy our lives and not let them slip away in dark clouds of distress over all the possibilities for future failure that cross our minds. We owe it to our children to show them how to do that. But we also owe it to ourselves and them to dream a little dream of a flourishing future for all our descendants.

I think we're ennobled when we keep one eye on the future, and diminished when we don't. I think the challenge of living is to enjoy our lives while not forgetting that they are indeed part of a process, while not allowing ourselves to transcend the mentality that views life as a chain we bear considerable responsibility for sustaining and extending.

It may sound a bit grim, that focus on perpetual responsibility for the future. It isn't, if we allow our speculations and dreams about distant ends and the possible futures we'll never know at first hand to expand our catalog of positive possibility.

And it isn't, if we give ourselves permission to take regular breaks from the feeling of burdensome responsibility and relax for a little while into pure immediacy. William James called those breaks moral holidays, and (contrary to Lachs's understanding) he was all for them. "I fully believe in the legitimacy of taking moral holidays," not because the world's fate is in better hands than ours but precisely because it isn't.

The visionaries of the Long Now Foundation dream of a day, possibly a day in the year 12,016, when tourists on holiday will journey to a destination that houses an ancient clock. There they will  marvel at the foresight and mentality of people who taught themselves, ten thousand years in the past, to transcend a life of pure and exclusive immediacy.

Lachs also favors moral holidays, of course, and cares deeply about the future - especially the immediate future of his students. I would simply encourage him to extend the purview of that care, and enjoy the view from 12,016 - now, while it's still one of our possibilities.

podcast
5:50/6:04, 57/66

Butterflies

"It is necessary to write," wrote Vita Sackville-West, "if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" I've long taken inspiration from that thought, which itself threatens constantly to flit away. It almost got away yesterday, when writing so absorbed my attention that I forgot to check the Almanac. Sometimes there are too many butterflies to track.

Tracking butterflies is another way of thinking about immediacy, though "tracking" may imply more deliberation and conscious intention than is desired. Less spontaneity and receptivity. The best experiences of immediacy seem just to happen, unsought, unsolicited, unexpected but very welcome. They flow. Or flit on the wind. No one, no thing, no visible chain of interference or interpretation interposes between you and the object(s) of your experience, when your net is working.

Writing is a highly directed and intentional activity, but it is possible occasionally to fall into a rhythm of words that seems to flit and flow without excess effort or angst. When that happens, writing is itself another fly for the net. 

I don't mean that genre of  involuted, tortured, self-conscious, overly self-involved post-modern hand-wringing that some indulgent writers perpetrate. I don't mean writing about writing at all, necessarily. I do mean writing that recognizes its own intrinsic value, undertaken both for its own sake and for the sake of noticing and attending to the world beyond pencil and keyboard.

All Things Shining, which I purchased at Powell's in Portland the other day, includes an interesting discussion of blogging as a species of writing that can feel direct and immediate and attentive, but become something else. Something derivative and dull. I'm pondering that. It was in the butterfly spirit that I began posting my dawn reflections, to capture more moments. How many butterflies get away, for every one snared? How many must you snare, to gain immediacy and claim attentive success? If one day in a hundred that would have slipped by gets caught, isn't that good enough?

5:45/6:06, 66/74

Radio

In Spring, when I was a young man, my fancy turned always to the crack of the bat and the thrill of the grass. Still does, and did yesterday with Spring Training beaming on the radio from places like Fort Myers FL and Surprise AZ, and sunshine beaming brightly in my own backyard in the middle of Spring Break.

Baseball on the radio has always transported me, first when I was a kid listening to Harry Caray, Jack Buck and the Cardinals on KMOX 1120 AM, and ever since.

It's always made me feel like a kid again, with nothing in the moment more urgent than the next pitch, hit, out, batter, inning. If my team didn't win it was a shame, but there was always hope for tomorrow's next game, and eventually for next year. Sometimes "we" won, sometimes lost, sometimes it rained, but the unfiltered immediacy of the sounds and conjured images crackling through those "50,000 red-hot watts" was hot indeed. It was almost better than being there.

(Being there with Older Daughter last year in St. Pete, Tampa, Clearwater, Dunedin, Bradenton (et al) was very nice, though.)

Yearning to recapture the vital immediacy of that childlike devotion, I keep tuning in every Spring just like I did yesterday. It's so much easier now that all the teams' radio broadcasts are available on the MLB phone app. So are most of the telecasts, but I'm not interested in crowding the game into a small screen. In my imagination it's so much better, so much bigger than life.

And now I'm in the mood to prepare my presentation for this year's annual Baseball in Literature and Culture conference...

6:00/6:07, 62/76

Buckets & quarts

Back from Ecotopia, bicycling Mecca, mythic Portlandia, genial host for this year's American Philosophy (SAAP) conference. It was wonderful being there, as I'll relate anon.

A year ago at this time it was great being in Florida with Older Daughter for Spring Training.

It was wonderful being here and in lovely La Vergne TN yesterday for Younger Daughter's first softball "scrimmage" of the season (I really resent the creep of football lingo into our game, Coach, please call it an exhibition) and her first dinger over the centerfield fence, against an outstanding new pitcher. A moment we've been waiting for all winter!

But therein lies a philosophical knot I need to tug. Being in the moment, and being happy to be there, is what my mentor John Lachs calls immediacy. Waiting for a moment, anticipating it, wishing and longing for it, may pull us away from countless potential moments of immediacy nearer to hand. It may also warm a cold winter's night, though, and bring a different kind of immediacy - the immediacy of expectation and hope.

This question of how to balance a quest for personal immediacy with a sense of responsibility to the future has teased me for a long time. I don't think it's detracted from my enjoyment of the present, but rather has linked many presents and brought the future close. It's been one of the streams I fish in, a tributary of the great Transcendentalist river Thoreau and Emerson paddled.

Isn't the future an inscrutable abstraction? Well, futurity may be. But living and breathing future humans are concrete possibilities, dependent largely on us until doomsday dooms us all. My mentor Lachs has always understood that, acting with tireless solicitude for the students he saw as tangible emissaries of the future, visiting us here in what will become (barring that rumored imminent doomsday) their past.

Balancing immediacy and futurity would then seem to be a matter of sensing where we are, in the present, with regard to past and future. John McPhee's Bill Bradley had that sense on the basketball court for Princeton, as chronicled by John McPhee (it's his birthday) in his first book A Sense of Where You Are (1965) and revisited by Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining (2011), one of my bargain snags at Portland's magnificent City of Books, Powell's. It's a special quality of attention to what's going on right now, that sets up smart choices going forward. Shoot, pass, or dribble? Doing the right thing next depends on how well we attend to what's happening now. Immediacy with a shot-clock: great metaphor! And what great inspiration for writers and scholars, to grasp the ultimate payoff of so many separate moments strung together:

McPhee has published more than 25 books, even though he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. He once tried tying himself to a chair to force himself to write more, but it didn't work. He said, "People say to me, 'Oh, you're so prolific.' God, it doesn't feel like it — nothing like it. But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart." WA

6:00/6:08, 53/76
6:00/6:10, 54/69

Telling it slant

Dr. Seuss said “I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.” John Irving said “If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.”  And Emily Dickinson said "Tell all the truth but tell it slant." I think they all mean the same thing: own your own point of view, be yourself, don't let the crazy whacked out world deny your vision.

Emerson, then. I'm off to the philosophy conference to consider him, and Dewey, and others who've advanced American philosophy with their distinctive end-of-the-scope perspectives. We had a good Emerson report in CoPhi yesterday from Cortney, who gave us an apt quote: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." She didn't mention "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." I know I like quotations. He did too, just didn't want to admit it. They're usually at the wrong end of the subjective POV telescope. But as Robert Richardson notes, he said "first we read..."

She must have been puzzled when I misunderstood her to say that he was buried in Sleepy Hollow NY (not Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord MA). Younger Daughter and I have been watching that preposterously entertaining show about the former, and it tickled me to imagine RWE rising from his eternal sleep and dabbling in the dark arts. Our conference session is on Emerson the naturalist (and Dewey the Hegelian), so I was primed to hear "Sleepy Hollow" slant.

What a crazy-sane "wrong end of the telescope" moment it was the other day when our current favorite Major Tom went floating on the ISS in his ape suit. Welcome back, Scott Kelly. Thanks for all the sunrises.

podcast
5:45/6:17, 33/50

Super

If we treated every day as everybody's birthday, I'm not sure when I'd have discovered poet Richard Wilbur's resolve to "jell things into an experience that will be a poem.” What a smart way to think of writing, jelling... a good reminder that experience isn't plug-and-play, isn't self-revealing, but must be opened and sorted and interpreted by the writer. That's the point of doing it, or a point.

Concision might be another. I have to be terse in class today, since it's a reporting day and we have many reports to hear. I hope they'll be terse too.

In CoPhi the spotlight's on Montaigne and Descartes. I never mention one without the other, the doubtful essayist and the indubitable rationalist. They're two ends of the see-saw. A rounded view of life requires both attitudes, but if sides must be taken I'll take Montaigne's. He just had a birthday on Sunday, he's widely credited (or by students cursed) as "creator of the personal essay, in which he used self-portrayal as a mirror of humanity in general. Writers up to the present time have imitated his informal, conversational style. He said, 'The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness: such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.'" If Descartes is the seated meditating thinker, Montaigne is the perambulating puncturer of pretension. On the highest throne, he said, or in the loftiest philosopher's armchair, you're still on your ass.

In Atheism we're up to Alain de Botton's "Pessimism" and  "Perspective" chapters. The former annoys me, especially when it takes comfort in the trials of Job. The latter eventually inspires, when it encourages our gaze to the heavens as a source of secular spirit. But it would have been good of him to acknowledge, after claiming that most astrophysicists have a tin ear when it comes to questions of the spirit, to mention Sagan's and Tyson's "Cosmos."

In Bioethics, Michael Sandel's "Mastery and Gift" chapter wonders if it's better to change our nature to fit the world or vice versa. Actually he doesn't wonder about that, his position is conservative. But we can wonder.

Also, I'm happy to report my selection of texts for next Fall's returning Environmental Ethics course: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein, and Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis by Tim Flannery. In a word, they - like me - are optimistic melioristic. Pessimism is an unaffordable luxury, these days.

Finally, in the spirit of meliorism on this Super Tuesday, I'm encouraging everyone to vote - after they check out cousin John Oliver's perspective. Let's #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain, America!

5:20/6:18, 45/64/31

Leap

We leap every fourth year to avoid Christmas in July? What would be wrong with that?

Social life requires the reliability of a consistent calendar. Academic scheduling requires it. The Almanac requires it.

But wouldn't it be an interesting psychology and sociology experiment, if we all just started marking off our days one by one like prisoners awaiting their release? We might, like prisoners, resent each new day as an obstacle to our freedom. Or we might welcome it as a step in the right direction.

We might come to think of each day as unique, in the Emersonian "days are gods" sense, and be more open to Michael Sandel's "unbidden". We might be more receptive and spontaneous, less structured and controlling. More in touch with our subjectivity, less in harness to the objective demands of the public world. Leap day is a good day to think about Kierkegaard.

Each day might really be a new beginning.

We'd stop celebrating one another compulsorily every 365th day. We'd more accurately recognize every day as a birthday, a potential party-&-gift occasion. Possibly we'd not take the present so much for granted.

And I'd eat more cake.

6:00/6:20, 50/64/47

Brooklyn

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Those were the concluding words of the speech that made Lincoln famous and propelled him to the Republican nomination, delivered on this date in 1860: a reminder that Republican presidential candidates used to be eloquent, serious, admirable, and wise, because the electorate used to insist on it. TR's "bully pulpit" wasn't meant for bullies.

But I'd rather think this morning about Brooklyn, which we saw at Regal Hollywood last night. It's a gorgeous step back into the early '50s, and as powerful a depiction of the fateful and momentous importance of choice as I've seen. Whoever calls it "sentimental drivel" has no heart, and probably hasn't read the Toibin novel it's based on. Saoirse Ronan is wonderful as Eilis, landing alone in Flatbush feeling lost as Crusoe but growing quickly and confidently into her new life.
==
A question to walk with this morning, thinking some more about Crusoe the castaway's salutary courage, independence, and immersion in the immediacy of his stranded situation: in light of Scheffler's doomsday scenario, would we still expect those salutary qualities to emerge in the utter absence of hope for a possible return to the collective human fold, or for humanity's future? If he were the last man on earth, on his island, would he still care? Or would he, like Tom Hanks in Castaway, have to get back to Memphis?

Does personal immediacy, in its richest form at least, presuppose collective humanity?

6:25/6:22, 30/61
Podcast

Immediacy

Turning disgustedly away from appalling reports of the latest trainwreck of a GOP "debate" between those petty and petulant little violators of their mythic hero's 11th commandment, this morning I'm thinking instead about a shipwreck, immediacy, and the passage of time.

John Lachs, in person and in Intermediate Man, put immediacy on my scholarly agenda when I arrived in Grad School back in the Great Communicator's early presidency. Far more importantly, he put it on my personal agenda. No one had ever drawn my attention so explicitly to the rich and rewarding possibilities inherent in attention per se, when we attend to the simple stuff of ordinary perceptual life.

The shipwreck in question was Robinson Crusoe's, fending entirely for himself without help to procure his meals, build his shelter, interpret his Bible, or plan his days. He had no choice but to attend, raptly and constantly. His stranded life was adverse but authentic, socially impoverished but perceptually full. His utter isolation is not to be envied, but his independence and self-reliance are impressive.

William James also spoke of shipwreck as one of life's permanent possibilities. If we love life we must be prepared to survive it, and to do that we must learn to live in immediacy. Most of us are rarely tested by anything so extreme as genuine shipwreck, thank goodness; but survival through conditions of extremity and hardship is within our range.

We'll survive this election season, for instance, if we don't allow our attention to be swallowed by the false "reality" of those contrived media circus events but instead turn to other and better things. What isn't better?

John Lachs dedicated Intermediate Man to his family, "three generations of immediacy." Way better!

5:50/6:24, 34/49/31

Scholars and politics

Moving poem today about feeling "stretched between past and future," rooted in time while gazing forward through moon and stars, imagining much earlier gazers who "stood where I stand, dreaming of what we’ve become." It evokes for me that collective mortal afterlife we've been pondering in Atheism, and the thought that living fully in the present is not denying or repudiating our future but realizing that our present was, in the past, their future.

A teacher's job is to help prepare young people of the present to meet and manage their future, when it presents itself. A scholar's job is to hone the skills of critical reflection that inform good teaching. I keep having to remind myself of that, these strange days, when it can seem irrelevant and self-indulgent to pursue a scholar's agenda while a carnival-barking, bullying "reality" huckster marches unimpeded towards a shot at the highest office in the land.

Next week I'm heading out to Portlandia to chair a philosophy session at the SAAP conference on Emerson and Dewey. What would they say about our current politics, and what a scholar should have to do with it? Would they think our time, at this moment, could be better spent than in extended and probably irresolute discussion of how naturalistic and Hegelian they were, respectively? Would they feel the Bern?

Emerson said lots of empowering things about the American Scholar but he could not possibly have imagined this moment. I barely can. But he's right, there's a right and wrong way to do it. "In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking." We're hearing lots of parrots on the campaign trail and in the reporters' galleries, but not much parroted thinking.

Dewey said “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.” That we includes us and them, the gazers and dreamers of our present and those to come. In times like these it's comforting to imagine them, looking back on us and shaking their heads in astonished wonder.

5:35/6:25, 40/42
6:00/6:26, 56/35

Good words

"Most of what happens happens beyond words," say the first words of today's poem. It's about marriage, but it applies to life at large. Bearing those words in mind makes it easier, curiously, to find more words.

I do love the words on the sign beside the little walking trail at the Baptist Church down the street:

“Regular walking can strengthen your heart and improve your general health. Walk and enjoy yourself as you enhance the quality of your life.”

I've been walking dogs (and the occasional daughter) past that sign for almost twenty years, and it's taken on a talisman-like significance for me. It's a personal mile-marker and reminder of temps perdu. It's by far the most positive message I've ever received from church, the church whose portal I've only ever passed to cast electoral votes.

The sign has been in decline for some time, the building & grounds committee apparently not considering it worthy of their attention. I took it upon myself to apply duct tape to a corner a few months ago, to hold it together a little longer. But the big windstorm the other day was too much. I found it blown several feet down the hill. Was this another kind of sign?

I deposited it at the church's door, and later emailed "Pastor Tom" who says he'll attend to it.

Moral of the story: don't underestimate the value of a few well-placed words.

What would our CoPhi subjects today say about that?  Machiavelli might say just steal it (but don't admit anything). Hobbes, I think, would be pleased that I didn't, that I'd upheld my end of the social contract with my neighbors. And as a fellow walker, I'm sure he'd understand my peculiar sentimental attachment to the words on that sign.

More good words will occupy us in Atheism: Kindness, Education, and Tenderness are our chapter titles in Religion for Atheists.

And before we consider eugenics in Bioethics, we'll follow up on last time's lively conversation on drugs. What is a drug, anyway, Alain de Botton? "Essentially a drug is anything that alters your mood acting via either the body or the senses to make an impact upon the mind." So that includes pomegranate juice, emmentaler cheese, the music of Mozart...

And words.

5:45/6:27, 46/61

Auden's drugs

Michael Sandel's plea in The Case Against Perfection for openness to the unbidden, as a counter to the coming seductions of genetic engineering and biotechnological reconstruction, somehow led us the other day in Bioethics to a conversation about recreational drugs. If you climb high enough into the "mountains," said one of us, the new view may be transformative. 

Others were more concerned about the disruption and degradation likely to follow the climber back down. It's still part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life, as James said, that so many of our peak experiences are unsustainable and eventually destructive.

That conversation was still echoing in mind when I came across this item in yesterday's Almanac:

W.H. Auden’s writing habits were simple: he woke up, had strong coffee and toast for breakfast, smoked cigarettes while completing the New York Times crossword puzzle and reading the obituaries, and then got to work. He had a liking for tripe, tongue, brains, polish sausage, Smirnoff martinis, and cognac. He enjoyed the freedoms of American life, especially during the 1960s, when he experimented with drugs. He tried LSD once and said, “Nothing much happened, but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me.”

It seems that Auden's better drugs were the legal ones, beginning with caffeine. Noted.

5:45/6:29, 46/57/41

All together now

I voted!

Early-voted in the March 1 Tennessee primary, down at the Belle Meade city hall, for the revolutionary candidate of my choice. Hooray, democracy! Always feels good to exercise the franchise, while the country's still in business.

Encouraging poem today about not fearing to fail. "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew" before he returned to Earth, notes poet Jack Gilbert. The only things worth writing about, he said, are “Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I.” That's plenty, but it's still a short list and Gilbert was a relatively un-prolific writer. “All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake — that the trees in bloom were almond trees — and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”

In CoPhi today it's Boethius in his cell with stoic Lady Philosophy, then Anselm and Aquinas. Christians all, though Bo didn't usually say so.

In Atheism, we turn to Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. It's a provocative title (and a more-than-provocative image of his fanciful notion of secular church on p.67), and he admits that most godless people don't like the R-word.

But just as John Dewey anticipated Scheffler's collective natural afterlife with his "continuous human community," he also proposed (in A Common Faith) a naturalistic reconstruction of our understanding of what it really means to be religious. Natural piety means recognizing, honoring, and working to sustain the ties that bind us all to one another and to the mortal world. You don't have to get religion, he's saying, to be "religious" in this sense. But atheists who like to congregate should feel free.

In Bioethics we consider the zealotry of overly-involved parents. They move heaven and earth to get their toddlers into elite pre-schools, and later helicopter their way into hyper-managing their kids' college lives. When genetic technology allows, says Michael Sandel, they'll likely intrude pre-natally too. They don't understand that we "do not choose our children" but must "accept them as they come." As the poet said, our children are not really ours.

Or rather, they're all ours. John Dewey again: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” I was thinking about that yesterday in the voting booth. Casting a ballot is a small, mostly symbolic way to connect and join forces with others who share your vision of how best to reconstruct your community. You could think of it as a religious or spiritual act. Or you could just say: we're all in this together.

5:45/6:33, 28/59

Passion

We turn to Augustine in CoPhi today, with his famous "not yet" plea for pious purity. What would he have said about Sam Scheffler's collective afterlife, or the idea that personal salvation takes a back seat in our imaginations and aspirations to a shared though mostly tacit commitment to the continuance of life on earth? Nothing very supportive as Saint, I'm sure, but in that fabled (and probably exaggerated) misspent youth he clearly understood the impulse for more of the sort of life we know as healthily embodied carnal spirits. The ethereal sort, he thought, could wait.

He wanted to live long with his youthful passions and animal vigor intact, not swap them for the "dangerous wisdom" (as today's poem has it) that leaves the playing field early and retires to the cloister too soon.

...Keats starved
himself to death because he yearned
so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne.
Emerson and his wife decided to make
love sparingly in order to accumulate
his passion.

But passion and life can't really be hoarded, young A. knew. Use it or lose it.

Speaking of playing fields...

In Bioethics we look today at Michael Sandel's "Bionic Athletes" and what's troubling about enhanced performance. Justice Scalia's opinion on the subject, that a game's rules are entirely arbitrary, is "far-fetched" indeed if we're thinking of the game of life. It's an essential rule of that most treasured game that winners leave it all on the field.

My favorite novelist Richard Ford (whose birthday it is) knows that, I think. "People always know more than I do, but what I know I know.”

Do we know that we possess (in Sandel's words) a "capacity to act freely, for ourselves, by our own efforts, and to consider ourselves responsible - worthy of praise or blame - for the things we do and for the way we are"? No, but maybe we should act as if we did.

5:40/6:36, 39/43/33

Posterity

Skeptics and Stoics share the bill in CoPhi today. In Atheism, critics offer their critiques of Samuel Scheffler's "collective afterlife." And in Bioethics we transition from Alastair Campbell's last chapter, on justice, to Michael Sandel's first in his Case Against Perfection, on the ethics of enhancement.

It's a confluence of themes in light of which it seems relevant to note Nelson Mandela's birthday. The struggle for justice never ends, but its greatest champions persevere. They insist that justice for all must be sought here and now, however many decades and generations it takes to expose and discredit the agents of injustice on earth. It is not to be permanently postponed or reassigned to another world, and it is not to be exchanged for the enhancement of the relative few.

The ultimate bioethical issue, as Campbell and the Royal Society conclude, is simply global survival.

Over the next 30-40 years [we face] the opportunity to move towards a sustainable economy and a better world for the majority of humanity, or alternatively the risk of social, economic, and environmental failure and catastrophes on a scale never imagined.

So there it is, a version of doomsday only slightly less terminally foreboding than the one Scheffler's had us playing with. Perfection is not on the table, but collective progress had better be.

The good news, as Susan Wolf says, is that doomsday is still only a scenario. Having turned this chilling thought experiment over in mind we're soberly brought back to "the meaning and value of the activities that would truly have been rendered pointless by imminent extinction." Time, though scarce, is not yet gone. "Now, once again, we have a reason to cure cancer, to find more sustainable energy sources," to give a thought to posterity as thought has been given to us.

5:40/6:41, 26/40

Time

We got a dusting of snow overnight, so - this being middle Tennessee - my school has just alerted us that we'll be starting late this morning, at 9:40. That's when my first class meets anyway, so I've not been gifted with more time after all.

Time's slippery elusiveness: that's a big theme today in class, and it's my theme this week as I approach yet another birthday. My step-Mom sent a card and a charming old photo of my Dad at about age two. He's been gone for over seven years now.

I awoke this morning, as I sometimes do, with the fragmented vestige of a quote I read somewhere recently clamoring for attention. The precise wording and source are eluding me. I'd like to pin it down, so I can call it up later at will. It was a well-wrought question about what causes some individuals and cultures to flourish, to greet each day with confidence, energy, and enthusiasm, while for others it's a constant struggle with anxiety, trepidation, and dread.

Was it Eric Weiner in Geography of Genius? But I can't find it there.

Whoever and wherever, it's a good question and that's a good book. Weiner thinks we overrate genetics and underrate the contribution of social environments in producing creativity and the zest for living and learning that you could call "genius" if you were careful not to mean something entirely beyond cultivation. We can plant and harvest the seeds of good living, it's not an entire mystery as to why some lives and lifestyles flourish while others founder.

And that's why we study the likes of Pyrrho and Epicurus and John Rawls, who'll turn up in my classes today. Pyrrho the skeptic was no role model, if you ask me, but he apparently had a genius for attracting the protective patronage of his peers. People who doubt the danger of dancing at cliff's edge don't survive without it.

Epicurus was much brighter (in both the "Bright" senses of practical wisdom and sunny disposition), but his dismissal of death as "nothing to us" was disingenuously glib.

 John Rawls comes into both our Atheism and Bioethics discussions today. His "circumstances of justice" suggest to Samuel Scheffler an aalogy to circumstances of value, and the idea that we only begin to truly grasp life's exquisite tenuity when we acknowledge time's scarcity. When time's up, we're out. That's not "nothing," Epicurus.

5:45/6:43, 27/30/17

Balance

Aristotle's up today. A life of flourishing is what we all seek, he knew, and we find it when we strike the right balance between deficiency and excess. That's a formula, not a precise prescription. Building one's character, becoming virtuous and eudaimonic, is not a magic bullet. It's an experimental quest, requiring long experience and plenty of trial and error. That's life.

In Atheism we continue to ponder Scheffler's thought experiments on the collective and mortal afterlife. We'll wonder about games and what they can teach us about life-and-death, about how much value we can really extract from a moment in time, how much it matters that we don't have an infinite supply of moments, and whether any of us would volunteer to be the last human. Does it trivialize Scheffler's serious question to think about Fox's Last Man?

In Bioethics we look at the uses and abuses of research, of which "perhaps the key ethical question is whether all the effort and money expended has been put to the best uses"... and whether the future of research promises to expand or constrict healthcare access, to promote everyone's best interests and enhance everyone's lives? Or only those whose pockets are deepest? Will we ever really "prioritize health research according to need rather than profit"?

Bernie and Hillary talked about that at last night in New Hampshire. Will it be revolution or evolution, radically quick change or slow incremental improvement to expand coverage and reduce costs? Which is more progressive, to tinker with the ACA until it works for everyone, or scrap it and fight for a single-payer system? The other party wants to scrap it all, of course. Why would anyone ever vote for that?

Speaking of pockets, Hillary got an unusual question from a Rabbi about ego and humility. Her response was unusually thoughtful. She thinks about it every day, she said, about striking a suitable balance between confident self-possession and humble self-effacement. Aristotle would approve that message.

5:45/6:48, 37/42/27

Humility, perfection, and death

We wake to a nation not yet required to anoint the least humble, least able, least perfect leader ever. Be grateful for small favors, and remember that Iowa is just Iowa. It's not heaven. It picks losers.

Socrates and Plato are on today in CoPhi. They're paired like salt and pepper but really don't go together, the way I tell it. One understands and expresses humility, offset by an unsettling irony and occasional hint of sarcasm. The other knows it all, and believes in the immaculacy of his own vision. One faces death squarely, the other reaches for eternity. Socratic wisdom is the denial of Platonic perfectionism, and vice versa.

But they inevitably go together in the classroom, since it's mostly Plato's writing that's preserved Socrates' talking, living, and dying, and that allow us to challenge the former's construal of the latter's worldview.

In Atheism we turn to Samuel Scheffler's natural "afterlife," the ongoing life of mortal humans whose continued existence he is sure we're more invested in, emotionally and valuationally, than most of us realize.

But will humanity survive for a good long time? Although we normally assume that others will live on after we ourselves have died, we also know that there are serious threats to humanity’s survival. Not all of these threats are human-made, but some of the most pressing certainly are, like those posed by climate change and nuclear proliferation. People who worry about these problems often urge us to remember our obligations to future generations, whose fate depends so heavily on what we do today. We are obligated, they stress, not to make the earth uninhabitable or to degrade the environment in which our descendants will live.

I agree. But there is also another side to the story. Yes, our descendants depend on us to make possible their existence and well-being. But we also depend on them and their existence if we are to lead flourishing lives ourselves. And so our reasons to overcome the threats to humanity’s survival do not derive solely from our obligations to our descendants. We have another reason to try to ensure a flourishing future for those who come after us: it is simply that, to an extent that we rarely recognize or acknowledge, they already matter so much to us. Stone

In Bioethics, we look at birth-to-death issues "thrown up in clinical practice by the huge advances in medical science and technology," things like transplantation, regenerative medicine, reproductive surrogacy, IVF, PGD, palliation, euthanasia... So much depends on how we conceive our species' proper limits and aspirations.

In all three classes, then, a useful framing issue is Perfectionism and its dream of defeating death. In all three, we'll do well to heed Socrates' famous near-final words: look out for wickedness, it runs faster than death and is life's greater foe.

5:50/6:49, 50/72