Pinhead dancers and friendly ghosts

[Orig. publ. 3.14.17]
Back from the break, diving into neo-Platonism and scholasticism, and a report on Harry Frankfurt's Bullshit ("On Bullshit" was originally penned in '86 and published in '05). "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this." Yes, everyone. Especially the purveyors, who don't really believe their own horse hockey. Do they? Or care about it, so long as it's "believable" enough to support the brand? Frankfurt, by the way, also wrote the natural sequel: "On Truth"... boy do we need that now more than ever!

Also, reports are scheduled on Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World and (with Descartes and his "what if I'm dreaming?" worry in mind) Inception ("Forget the end of the film. Think about the beginning and the real world..."). Maybe Nigel Warburton's Classics too. And the Simpsons again? D'oh!

The year 529 is a semi-arbitrary but convenient milestone, with Emperor Justinian's shuttering of the philosophical schools in Athens ushering in a millennium of intellectual somnambulism. The Sleeping Beauty version of this narrative says philosophy pricked its finger on Christianity and awaited an awakening buss from its aforementioned French rationalist Prince Rene in the 17th century.

Looking back from then, Francis Bacon would complain of "cobwebs of learning'' and Thomas Hobbes would say the problem was Roman religion's sponsorship of "Aristotelity"-which is is not Aristotelianism but its unthinking authoritarian parody, made to conform with Church dogma and stripped of curiosity. 

It needn't have been so. A respectful Aristotelianism fused with theology might have had wonderful discursive results, with talk of soul and sin leading seamlessly into fruitful reflections on mind-body and free will. Instead, "Christians were required to believe, for example, that a piece of wafer could become flesh... and that God could become three persons at once." 

Were? Past tense?  Let's not be smug, standing here potentially on the precipice of another Dark Ages "led" by benighted Climate and Science Deniers, Conspiracy Kooks, and ethnic chauvinists. Sad. Scary. Wonder what Stephen King thinks of Steve King? Who's scarier? No contest.

"By the year 1000, medicine, physics, astronomy, biology and indeed all branches of theoretical knowledge except theology had virtually collapsed. Even the few relatively educated men, holed up in mosasteries, knew markedly less than many Greeks had done eight centuries earlier... In short, Christendom was colossally ignorant."

The cult of Aristotle was sloppy, and inattentive to their favorite (& only) Philosopher's actual views. Medieval Christians "knew" that the soul survives death. Aristotle said it didn't, his God was disinterested in humans, and he was dubious about that wafer. We must not forget that "he himself was animated by the spirit of open-minded inquiry," which at its best uses the spoken and printed word to fuel passionate curiosity-not shut it down. So, "the real problem with medieval learning is that the medieval professors allowed themselves to be tyrannized by books... Instead of putting ideas to the test of new experience, they... put them to the test of old books." Old books are great, but they should never have the last word.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hint: How many bodies do you need to dance? Call this the Caspar the Friendly Ghost Problem: how can Caspar move through a wall AND catch a ball? Dan Dennett is "convinced that Descartes’ dualism — the idea that an immaterial mind interacts with a material body — was a 'cul-de-sac'... 'There was a latent contradiction built into the very idea of Casper the Friendly Ghost and basically that’s what’s wrong with dualism. Nobody’s ever solved that problem remotely satisfactorily.'" It was an entertaining show, but I recall being perturbed when they interrupted it one day to break the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

I want to get a word in for Philo of Alexandria, the millennial philosopher with the perfect name who nowadays gets little attention or respect. He began, and a pagan teacher named Alcinous continued, "a tradition of marrying holy scriptures to Greek philosophy" with the claim that the God of scripture is identical with the Good of Plato. ("Plato himself would have insisted that they were utterly different.) Like many arranged marriages, these were often bereft of passion and hard to sustain. But it was, and for some still is, a popular tradition.

Another Diogenes (not the Dog Philosopher) created "the strangest document in the history of philosophy" (c.120 AD) with a huge Vietnam Memorial-like colonnade inscribed with Epicurean wisdom updated to catch the zeitgeist of "salvation" through philosophy. That's not really what Epicurus was talking about. 

This is another arranged marriage likely to founder, unless we understand that those who've attained ataraxia consider themselves already "saved," not lost. They aren't looking to go anywhere. As Jennifer Michael Hecht says, Epicureans aren't looking for a path out of the forest. They just wanted to hang a "Home Sweet Home" sign on a tree" and chill. "...pick some blueberries, sit beneath a tree, and start describing how the sun-dappled forest floor shimmers in the breeze... Just try to have a good time."

Plotinus's "Neoplatonism" was trying to eff the ineffable, to describe the indescribable. Futility, thy name is Plotinus. It all comes down (or goes up?) to The One, for him. But it's all the same, isn't it, in this Heraclitean flux? But The One is beyond being. Doesn't seem like there'd be much more to say. Just, “withdraw into yourself and look.” 

When he withdrew and looked, Plotinus claimed to see that  “the world is finite, harmonious, and good,” that it possesses a purchase on divine perfection by virtue of the continuous "emanations" therefrom that reach even us. How does he know that? “The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.” Yes, but... You really get all that from a sweep of introspection, Plotinus? Why don't I? Why doesn't everyone? Is it possible you're reading some things into your account, engaging in a bit of wishful thinking? And engaging in a bit of corporeal revulsion, "almost ashamed of being in the body"? But how, except with your body, are you going to hammer up a HOME sign, sit under a tree, and chill?  

"Proclus of Athens (*412–485 C.E.) was the most authoritative philosopher of late antiquity and played a crucial role in the transmission of Platonic philosophy from antiquity to the Middle Ages." He was a magical thinker, holding that "the job of philosophy was merely to explain spiritual truths which had already been arrived at by other means" and "treat[ing] the basic premises of his theology as if they were beyond question." Magical thinking endures in our time. Fortunately, questioners do too.

Lots of good questions suggest themselves today. How do we respect and revere books without being "tyrannized" by them, for instance? How should we think about Caspar? What is "salvation"? What's the job of philosophy? My answer to the last: to help us figure out how not to be tyrannized, how to think about Caspar, how not to think of ourselves as "lost" so we won't have to be "saved."
==
10.23.17. The first national Women's Rights Convention opened in Worcester, Massachusetts, on this date in 1850. Two years earlier, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had launched the woman suffrage movement with their hastily organized Seneca Falls Convention in New York. They published the Declaration of Sentiments, using language modeled after the Declaration of Independence, to call for voting rights for women. They also expressed a hope that conventions for women's rights would continue to be held at regular intervals... And on this day in 1920, the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis was published (books by this author)... Lewis wrote:

“The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust.” And: “She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.” And: “I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.”
==
Amy Krouse Rosenthal has died. She was not lost. Her remarkable viral essay bespeaks an Epicurean love of life that was its own saving grace. "Her favorite line from literature, she once said, was in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” as spoken by the character Emily as she bids the world goodbye: 'Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?'

When she reached 40, Ms. Rosenthal began calculating how many days she had left until she turned 80.

“How many more times, then, do I get to look at a tree?” she asked. “Let’s just say it’s 12,395. Absolutely, that’s a lot, but it’s not infinite, and I’m thinking anything less than infinite is too small a number and not satisfactory. At the very least, I want to look at trees a million more times. Is that too much to ask?”
==
Happy birthday Albert Einstein, who said "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." And, “The important thing is not to stop questioning." And, “It is not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.”  And, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

5:30/7 am, 37/41/22, 6:51

The Happy Heretic-David Hume

Back to Happiness, after a lovely little Fall Break. Spent part of mine happily with family and bicycle in the woods around The University of the South, in Sewanee. The Domain, they call it, kind of a world unto itself. Profs and students wear gowns to class, and "Sewanee angels watch over and protect the members of the Sewanee community..." Well, if it makes them happy to think so I suppose a heretic should raise no serious objection, since the Anglican-modeled Episcopalians on the Mountain tend not to proselytize or persecute.  What would David Hume say? Or "primitive cultures" and/or Bill Wilson? (I'm unclear about today's report topic. Are 12-steppers a primitive culture? Hmm...)

[Orig. published 10.15.15:]

It was kind of an unofficial Heretics Day in CoPhi, with Spinoza and reports on Galileo, and Luther. The theme continues this morning with more Luther, and St. Paul (another equestrian accidentalist like Montaigne, not usually described as a heretic... but what else should we call the inventor of such major tenets of the incipient upstart Christian faith as Jesus' divinity, holy spirit, atonement etc.? ); and in Happiness we're spending just a bit of time with the happy heretic David Hume,  "Le Bon David," "the Great Infidel." He said:

• “Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.”
• "Tendency to joy and hope is true happiness; tendency to fear and melancholy is a real unhappiness."
• “He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper, but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to his circumstance.”
• “Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the Good and the Bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.” 
• “To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.” 
• "If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.”

One of Hume's heresies, increasingly mainstream with time and the ubiquity of Buddhist thinking, is the illusion of selfhood. “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception..." This is a subtraction that many, like Alison Gopnik, have found additive. Lost baggage can lighten a journey and gladden the heart.

Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise...

But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game. 

In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people... (continues)

Another Humean heresy, especially where I live, is his skepticism regarding miracles.

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should have really happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

It's not a position most students are initially happy with, but in the long run the habit of "rejecting the greater miracle" removes motes from the eyes and restores clear vision. For some, that's the greatest miracle of all.
==
10.19.17. Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino was born on this day in 1433 (d. 1499). He said “in these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.” And “at every person's birth, he or she is assigned a certain daemon by his own star, a guardian of life to help with his destined task.” Seems like your daemon might be of assistance in discovering what you want. Have you found yours?

Ficino also said: "Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again." And, if you can believe the Internet: "Never worry about anything. Live in the present. Live now. Be happy." Hmm. We thought it was Bobby McFerrin.
==

Podcast
5:30/6:55, 49/79

Middle Ages

Back from Fall Break. Good times with the family re-united, hiking and biking on the Mountain and in the Domain and in our own backyard.  Now to the not-entirely-dark ages.

[Orig. published March 2017:]

What a summery first day of Spring that was!

Back from the philosophy conference in Birmingham, in Vulcan's shadow, where I was pleased to meet John Kaag and thank him for his American Philosophy: A Love Story. He's a peripatetic too, noting that "walking gives one many things," especially time and attention. “Looking back," he writes, "I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life." And, “The love of wisdom was not bound in academic journals that no one read; it rather permeated all aspects of human existence.”

And most pointedly: "The point of American philosophy isn't to be 'right'... is not to have a specific rock-solid point, but rather to outline a problem, explore its context, get a sense of the whole experiential situation..." Always good to remember, at a conference. SAAP conferees tend to remember it better than some others.

Then, I contributed my small bit to the William James Society's panel discussion of immortality "re-envisioned"and "Existential Pluralism" and reaffirmed our continuing commitment as public philosophers to the ongoing project of constructively melding and applying American philosophy's traditional elements - pragmatism, pluralism, radical empiricism, and especially meliorism. Some of my friends find it very difficult to do that, on paper. In practice, and in the spirit of James, I don't see how we can possibly fail to try.

I'm with him: "I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not?" Only time and experience will finally tell. In the meantime, we must remember: "The inner significance of other lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight. If we feel a significance in our own life which would lead us spontaneously to claim its perpetuity, let us be at least tolerant of like claims made by other lives."  Let us not let "blindness lay down the law to sight." And let us not stamp out possibilities, prematurely. [My wife reminded me of that, out on the patio at Bar Louie in downtown Nashville yesterday, as I gazed longingly at the upscale high-rise condos and wished for the possibility of reincarnation, to see what it would be like to live up there.]

The most compelling and most vulnerable possibility these days, surely, is the very continuation of lives worth living. The really vital question persists: what is life going to make of itself, on this earth of things? That's the existential question. As Billy Collins says in today's poem ("The Order of the Day"), you never really know.

In late antiquity and the middle ages the big questions tended to be more about life's rumored sequel and how to achieve it. Augustine first thought you had to make alliance with the forces of good, in their death struggle with the forces of darkness. He was on the right track, I tend to think, before his big conversion. He was right to suppose that our side needs all good hands on deck, to resist and overcome evil. He put that conversion off as long as he could, praying for purity but only in due course. For the record, though: I don't think he was right to think of our carnal condition as an entombment. Incorporeal souls sow no wild oats, ascetics enjoy few existential delights.

So, buoyed by Platonism, he "put all forms of materialism firmly behind him" and "turned back the clock of intellectual history." The old Greek commitment to reason was not finally comforting enough to him. "He returned to a version of the comforting supernatural stories which most of the first philosophers sought to dispense with, or at least to rationalize."

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy dialogue found its own form of comfort, not in Augustine's Christianity but in Lady Philosophy's timeless stoicism. God (or Good?) sees all in a single atemporal sweep, "at a go," and thus somehow leaves the hapless victim of tortured persecution and execution as free as it found him. He can still choose to be "philosophical" about every misfortune, even to his dying breath on the rack. His freedom's a lot like Kris Kristofferson's and Janis Joplin's, "just another word for nothing left to lose."

Anselm's God, "than which nothing greater can be conceived," and his famous "proof" thereof, is another of those notorious sleights of hand made to do heavy philosophical lifting with nothing more muscular than verbiage. It's still shocking to me, how many bright people (including young Russell, briefly) it's seduced. 

Speaking of great misfortune, poor Abelard's is painful to ponder. Gottlieb blames "his scholarly prowess and his passionate involvement with logic" for emboldening him to undertake his own fateful seduction. How ironic, that he would go on to make his mark as "the first serious moral philosopher of medieval times" and "to apply rational analysis to the nature of moral goodness." Too little, too late.

Moses Maimonides did not address Abelard's peculiar form of perplexity but did try to bring philosophy, science, and religion together. “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” But try telling that to the world. He was right, though. “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” But, “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.”

He was onto confirmation bias early. “We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

Was he really the first to say this?: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Did he anticipate James's Will to Believe notion that "our errors are not such awfully solemn things"? “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”

He was sort of a bioethicist before his time: “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.” And, “No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.” Actually that might have helped Abelard, with a little timely saltpeter in his diet.

William of Ockham's famous "razor" said we should keep our theories simple, our ontology thin. "It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less." Remember Goober's beard?

Remember Buridan's Ass? Apparently "no such animal appears in his writings." Too bad, he's been such a workhorse for logicians.

Giordano Bruno was a mystic friar, but he also had a vivd scifi imagination. He said there must be other worlds and "countless suns" out there in the Void, "innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow." We've only confirmed that in the past twenty years or so. It (and other heresies) got him torched in 1600. Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson tell his story.

Finally today, Aquinas. His First Cause Argument, echoing Aristotle, said a never-ending series of causes and effects would lead to an unacceptable regress. The first term in any explanatory sequence, he thought, has to be self-evident. But is that itself self-evident? Russell says, of "the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term: Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary. But here again no Catholic is likely to abandon belief in God even if he becomes convinced that Saint Thomas's arguments are bad; he will invent other arguments, or take refuge in revelation." It's not just Catholics. Remember confirmation bias?

More questions: Can the definition of a word prove anything about the world? Is theoretical simplicity always better, even if the universe is complex? Does the possibility of other worlds somehow diminish humanity? Which is more plausible, that God exists but is not more powerful than Satan, or that neither God nor Satan exists? Why? Are supernatural stories of faith, redemption, and salvation comforting to you than the power of reason and evidence? And what do you say to Carl Sagan?:

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” 

[More good questions here... ]
==
It was on this day in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.

Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable... With transistor radios, teenagers were able to listen to music out of their parents' earshot. This made possible the explosion of a new genre of American music: rock and roll. WA

On this day in 1867 US takes formal possession of Alaska from Russia having paid $7.2 million... 1922 British Broadcasting Company (BBC) founded, later called British Broadcasting Corporation... 1962 James Watson (US), Francis Crick (UK) and Maurice Wilkins (UK) win the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work in determining the structure of DNA

==

3.14.17. Happy birthday J.S. Bach, who said “I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.” That's not what Dan Dennett says in From Bacteria to Bach and Back. “You shouldn’t trust your intuitions. Conceivability or inconceivability is a life’s work—it’s not something where you just screw up your head for a second!”

The Alabama Freedom March began on this date in 1965. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and 3,200 demonstrators set off on a 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the disenfranchisement of black voters... WA
5:30/6:50, 59/73/46, 6:57 

Spinoza's joy

Today in Happiness we finish Frederic Lenoir's Happiness: A Philosopher's Guide. It's an answer to the SoL's charge that western academic philosophy no longer offers the kind of therapeutic balm and succor, the therapy, that inspired the Hellenistic Age. We have resources too, if you're willing to cherry-pick your western medicine: a little Stoicism here, a little Epicureanism there, a little Spinoza, a little Plato (not Prozac)...

But first, a word of appreciation for our reporters last time. That mindful moment out on the Peck Hall stoa, framed by a gentle rain, was calming. We should do that again.

Spinoza was mindful in his way. His possessions were few: books, desk, optical workshop, the four-poster bed of both his conception and his demise. Do people who retain tangible continuity with the familiar furniture of their lives, over a lifetime, find peace of mind easier to have and hold?

He wanted to free us from the "cruel illusion" of free will, in deference to the "spinozism of freedom" (as my old teacher called it) that he found in surrender to causal necessity. To be free, in these terms, is to shelve the will and find liberation in rational understanding. It's to transcend the narrow and selfish ego, to discard the sense of personal marginality and alienation, to embrace the widest possible identity in the whole.

Does that identity squeeze out particularity and individualism? Not in Lenoir's interpretation. "We must all learn to know ourselves in order to discover what makes us happy or unhappy..." 

Well, good. Great. But what if we discover that what makes us happy is the sense of ourselves as causal agents whose wills do sometimes find expression in purposive activity that makes a difference, that alters events and creates alternative futures? What if we desire that identity? Is it a bad desire?

"The role of reason then consists not in judging and reprimanding a bad desire (as morality does), but in arousing new desires, more securely established, that will bring us greater joy." Lenoir offers the example of his niece, whom he says reason instructed to desire a more serious approach to school. Reason, not will, "enabled her to do all that was necessary..." (165) Are we sure about that? I'm not.

To be happy we must "focus on energizing the forces of life: to nourish joy, love, compassion, kindness, tolerance, benevolent thoughts, self-esteem..." Sounds like a big job for reason alone.

Is "joy" a passing emotion or a "permanent feeling"? It can be both, surely. But our "essential truth" is that "joy of living" that engenders gratitude, harmony, peace, and freedom. Spinoza's way is one path, but it's not the only one. Lenoir's last words echo some of what we heard on Tuesday about finding happiness within ourselves, urging indispensable "inner labor". Agreed, but again with the proviso that inner work must eventually connect with outer exertion, must translate into engagement and not, finally, detachment.

Some questions: Can we freely choose to renounce free will? Or freely choose to affirm it? Or seek new desires? (Remember Schopenhauer's "We can do what we want, but not want what we want.") Why shouldn't we expect a pantheistic universe to yield universal rules of behavior? Can a rationalist- pantheist endorse delusional sources of happiness? 178 Was Einstein being disingenous when he affirmed "Spinoza's God"? If  "there isn't an inch of earth where God is not," does God not have a lot to answer for?
==
It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students. It had been written just a month earlier by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy, who published it in Youth's Companion and distributed it across the country. It was recited on this day to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas... It's the birthday of author and psychologist Robert Coles (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1929). He's the author of more than 60 books. Coles was in the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement, planning to lead a low-key life as a child psychologist. But one day, during a visit to New Orleans in 1960, he saw a white mob surrounding a six-year-old black girl named Ruby Bridges, who was kneeling in her starched white dress in the middle of it all to pray for the mob that was attacking her. Coles decided to begin what would become his work for the next few decades, an effort to understand how children and their parents come to terms with radical change. He conducted hundreds of interviews on the effects of school desegregation, and he shaped them into the first volume of Children of Crisis (1967), a series of books for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973... He said, "We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it's too late." WA

Stoics, Skeptics, & Taoists

We're looking for points of contact between eastern and western notions of happiness today in Happiness. Epictetus the Stoic said its our judgments about things (including people) that disturb us, not things (or people). Shantideva the Buddhist sage said it's better to "kill the spirit of hatred" rather than go after the haters one by one. The spirit, like the judgment, resides within oneself.

That may be strategically sound, but those who've actually witnessed White Supremacist rallies (for instance) testify that the spirit was all too manifest and out in the open. My judgment about such people is about such people, not just about itself. Is the best way to combat them really through an inward turn? Maybe, if the inner transformation then radiates in the form of action towards social justice. Detach from hatred, then attach to reform. Repeat as needed.

Does it help to replace anthropomorphic gods with a pantheistic sense of divine unity? You'd have to accept the bundle, wouldn't you, bad apples and all? The world is one but it's also many, including many joys and sorrows. I can affirm the former without reservation, but less of the latter would have to be better.

Epictetus's dogcart analogy suggests "we need to unite our wills with the necessity of destiny." Are we the dog? Or the cart-driver? I'll accept the journey and even enjoy it if I know my intended destination.

If we cannot ever "bend the world to our desires" we may as well stop seeking satisfaction. What if we can occasionally bend it a bit, though? That might be enough reward for our effort to elicit more, for many.

Samsara, the cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth that Buddhists say sustains our "erroneous perception of reality," is (they say) rooted in desire. But the desire to ameliorate suffering does not distort reality, it improves it. The problem isn't desire per se, it's too many of the wrong desires and not enough of the good ones. No?

Cosmopolitanism, for my money, is the Stoics' greatest invention. We're all citizens of the world, indeed the cosmos, and can be trained to desire the good of all sentient beings. Narcissistic individualism is just a stage, if we're smart enough to enter training.

Chuang Tzu and Montaigne both liked to laugh. "These two skeptics mock the dogmatic, enjoy relating irreverent anecdotes, deride the complacent and are able to laugh at themselves..." Que scay-je? What, me worry? But don't get carried away, skeptic, "seek a balance between dogmatism and skepticism... 'reach an opinion and [don't] hesitate to proffer it'..." Montaigne's wisdom, says Lenoir, "comes down to a sort of great, sacred 'yes' to life." His yes seems more genuinely affirming than Nietzsche's, seems to me. We'll talk about that later.

Taoist paradoxes can be frustratingly cryptic: forget yourself to find yourself, try not to try etc. Apparently that frustration is supposed to be instigating and revealing, not just annoying. 

But I am a bit annoyed by the suggestion that we should be "content with the radiance [of the sun] without trying to scrutinize its source." We need to understand the source, and thereby intensify our contentment and magnify our competence to replicate the radiance. You don't have to be a Platonist about suns and Forms of the Good to think so.

Some questions: Do you agree that things are inherently neutral, with respect to their bearing on your happiness, and that it's only your opinion of them that matters? In general, what's your attitude towards desire and attachment? Are they obstacles to happiness or prerequisites for it?
How important are "willpower" and self-control to your happiness? What can you do to strengthen them? What does "Living the present" mean to you? Is there a problem with it, as either a goal or a possible attainment? Does anticipating bad possibilities (as Cicero did with his daily praemeditatio) make you happier in the long run, or less so? What did John Lennon mean by "instant karma"? (It was his birthday yesterday, he'd have been 77. Hard to imagine.)
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It's playwright Harold Pinter's birthday. He said: "How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life." WA... and on this day in 1899, "African-American inventor Issac R. Johnson patents the bicycle frame"...

Individual & collective happiness etc.

What fun in Happiness last time, listening to Kyle's Happy Playlist and pondering our own. How sobering, though, to see Robin Williams cavorting on the Bobby McFerrin's "Don't worry, be happy" video in full knowledge of his tragic self-negating destiny. But perhaps it's not accurate to say he took his own life, rather that life's vicissitudes and invasive mental disease took it from him. Before then he made a lot of people happy and dispatched a lot of gratuitous worry. So sad he couldn't do the same, ultimately, for himself. But mental illness is like a hurricane, there's only so much you can do to prepare for it. Luck is also required.

What would we add to the list? Mine had to include The Beatles' In My Life, leading to Hey Jude, to When I'm 64... And thinking of Tom Petty, a Resilience soundtrack would be a great sequel. That's the quality of character these times seem most to require and will most reward. 

Today in Happiness we begin with a surprising statement from Spinoza: "When each man most seeks his own advantage for himself, then men are most useful to one another." That's discordant with the notes we sounded last time against "visceral egoists" and for altruists. But pantheists don't really believe in individuals and their egos, certainly not in an Ayn Randian sense. He did believe that happiness comes from identification with the most inclusive whole we can conceive. So, I wonder what Lenoir intends with that decontextualized epigraph.

Would we rather be happy than "sublime or saved"? Not sure we have to face that choice. "Earthly happiness" checks both of those boxes, for me (and Voltaire). Note to class: register for PHIL 3310, "Atheism & Philosophy" next semester if you want to pursue that question. It's distinctly related to the modern bifurcation Lenoir deplores, the separation of individual well-being from the common good.

Michel Houellebecq writes all about "narcissistic individualism: his characters are apathetic, egoistic, frustrated, cynical...joyless hedonis[ts]" who wouldn't know the meaning of individual good if it bit them. He seems to think they are us.

But who are we really? Lenoir's friend Bruckner thinks "we are probably the first societies in history to make people unhappy about not being happy... the obsession with happiness often thwarts happiness." How depressing. Irony is supposed to make you smile, at least, isn't it?

And oh by the way, depression is a symptom of our unhappy obsession and a reflection of our question for self-realization without adequate social support. Making matters worse, nature has wired us to look for trouble. "We become more aware of negative events... dissatisfaction makes us strive constantly for more and better things." Can we learn to take satisfaction in our very dissatisfaction, to see it as emblematic (again) of our capacity for resilience? Don't back down, get back up, be happy. Is that a formula we can work with?

Another question today points back to J.S. Mill's "durable joy" and delight in feeling, after much too much thinking. "Would you become blase, were all your desires satisfied?" Mill perplexed himself with the realization that fulfilling all his intellectual and social/political goals would leave him no happier than before. Then he broadened his portfolio of desires to include Wordsworth. We can learn from that too, not necessarily from Wordsworth (though also not necessarily not). Our poetry may be music, and "the music can commence again..." Silly music (and poetry) is sometimes the best balm. Take it away Eric...

Squeeze this one into the Happy/Resilient playlist too. "It's alright," as Tom sings, "I'm just glad to be here, happy to be alive... at the end of the line."
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It’s the birthday of American astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) (books by this author), who once said, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” Tyson is the host of the popular shows Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and Star Talk. He grew up in the Bronx and remembers visiting the Hayden Planetarium’s Sky Theatre on a school field trip, which inspired his interest in astronomy and science. He said, “So strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I’m certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me.” He’s now the director of the Planetarium. Tyson’s television shows, podcasts, and books have inspired millions of people to see the universe with new eyes.
He’s so popular that he has appeared as himself in television shows and movies like The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, and Zoolander 2. He’s also been featured as himself in comic books like Action Comics #14, in which he discusses Superman’s home planet of Krypton.
On the importance of explaining complex science to the layman, Tyson once said: “Humans want to think that they’re the center of the world. Children think this way. Then you come into adulthood and it’s a little disappointing to learn that’s not the case. We still think of events happening locally, in our lifetimes, as significant in a way that is out of proportion with reality. This can be depressing to some people, if you come into it with a high ego. If you go into it with no ego at all, you realize that you can be special not for being different, but for being a participant in life on Earth. That participation, if you’re open to it, can be quite illuminating, even sort of spiritually uplifting. You’re a part of all of life on Earth. Earth is part of all the planets that exist in the galaxy. The galaxy is part of an entire system of the universe.”
Tyson’s books include Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017).

It’s the birthday of scientist Robert Hutchings Goddard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1882), who is known as the “Father of the Space Age.” From childhood, Goddard had been fascinated by space travel, finding inspiration in part from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. He began studying physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and as a student he decided that the most effective propellant would be a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. In 1926, he discovered an even more effective liquid fuel combination: gasoline and liquid oxygen. He launched the world’s first liquid-propelled rocket, a small device that went up 41 feet and landed 184 feet away. In 1930, Goddard moved his operations to Roswell, New Mexico, establishing the world’s first professional rocket proving ground. WA

Now to Happiness: A History... 

Contagious happiness

"Are you happy?" is too unequivocal, too binary a question for Frederic Lenoir. Our happiness is a sliding continuum, "and our impression of happiness fluctuates with time."  A lot of us slide back, in the wake of an atrocity like Las Vegas. Most of us will slide forward again, eventually (and the meliorists among us, like Nick Kristof, will immediately look beyond the prayers and the mourning and the attributions of "pure evil" to what we can do (like stand up to the NRA, Rosanne?)... and of course, the BSers will exploit the situation with their insidious fakery.

Tom Petty has died. In 2006 he told Terry Gross about the elation he felt after losing his home and everything in it (except his family) to an arsonist and would-be murderer. He learned the lesson we all have to keep learning again and again: just being alive can be enough.. until it isn't. He wrote "I Won't Back Down" as a celebratory anthem of resolute happiness and endurance, inspired a lot of people to buck up and carry on, suffered a serious depression years later. And again, he got better. Not backing down, for most of us, is more about getting back up. Resilience.

Insights like J.S. Mill's, on the durable sources of joy amidst life's travails, grease the skids that get us back on our happy tracks. He was raised by his overbearing Pop to think, but (with an assist from the poet Wordsworth) taught himself to find joy in feeling.

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…

Adam Etinson concludes, in The Stone, that "we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation... [to] escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum: to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion."

It's become a commonplace to say that most people revert, after confronting serious illness, career disappointment, traumatic violence, or (alternately) a positive event, to their happiness "fixed point." We may not want to hear that, but in times like these it's probably good news. Lenoir says he's found it possible to "break through to new levels," and the bare possibility may be enough to keep most of us in active pursuit. Even if we generally revert to form, it's nice to ponder the perpetual possibility of a breakthrough.

The "age effect" will dispirit most students, if they think they have to wait for their sixth decade to begin experiencing a "notable rise"... followed by a new phase of decline after seventy. Guess I should be having the time of my life right now, in the "mellowness of maturity." I'd like to counter that you're only as old as you feel, but from an aches-and-pains perspective that's not always so reassuring. I prefer to collect inspiring examples of octogenerians, nonagenerians, and centenarians who've flourished in the autumn and early winter of life, people like Stewart Udall, Will Durant, Jimmy Carter... but not Hef.

Friendship (philia), Aristotle was surely right to say, is for most a crucial condition of happiness. "Visceral egoists" are not great friends, if you need a reason to reject that attitude. Altruists, on the other hand, are terrific. Not sure I agree with Lenoir and Ricard that "human nature is fundamentally good," but I've known many natures who were. Unfortunately, the human nature scale is also a continuum that runs the gamut and includes the likes of the Las Vegas shooter.

"Every happy friend increases our probability of being happy by 9 percent" but misery also loves company. I still wonder about the impact of happy pessimists, if we've agreed that there are such critters. 

The "shared rapture" of rooting for a winning team can indeed be upliftng, but unlike the biblical rapture it doesn't last. Wait 'til next year. Next week. Tomorrow.

Are we really "almost all 'more or less happy'" most of the time? We're up and down the scale, for sure, and that would seem to mitigate the suggestion that we might realistically aim to be"happy every moment" - unless we've followed Aristotle's program and decoupled eudaimonia from every moment. The visceral egoists deserve to fail every program, if life were fair.

Finally: if shaudenfreude can be explained in evolutionary terms, cooperation and mutual support can too. We can learn to take pleasure in others' happiness. Nurture, as we were saying yesterday, can improve our nature.

And as William James said, even after a desolating event "the music can commence again and again..." That's your cue, Kyle. I hope your happiness soundtrack will cheer us all up. Does it include any Tom Petty (R.I.P.)? Traveling Wilburys, maybe? Don't back down, be happy.
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Today is the birthday of Harvey Kurtzman (1924) (books by this author), cartoonist and creator of MAD Magazine... Critics see the magazine as a forerunner for much of American satire that came after it, including The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. Art Spiegelman, the writer of the graphic novel Maus, said, “The message MAD had in general is, ‘The media is lying to you, and we are part of the media.’ It was basically … ‘Think for yourselves, kids.’” WA