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Archive for October, 2023
Unmasked
October 31, 2023A merrier world
October 31, 2023“When am I done being good?”
October 28, 2023
Never, if you’re a good person. But life offers moments of respite and regeneration. Did you see last night’s World Series Game 1?!
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The poem of the future
October 28, 2023The poem of the future will be smaller.
It will fit in the palm of your hand,
on your wrist, in your ear…
It will fit in the palm of your hand,
on your wrist, in your ear…
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“When Am I Done Being Good?”
October 28, 2023Never, says the author of Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help. And that can be exhausting.
“…we are never done with justice or with human need; we are never done with other people, with compassion or respect; and we never get to exhale, gratefully, ‘I am done with being good.’” Kieran Setiya
But, I say, we can be done, over and over again throughout our lifetimes, with being exhausted and fully spent from the effort of living and fighting for justice, decency, honesty, mutual compassion etc. etc.
That’s what William James meant by moral holidays, the delightful atelic stretches when we detach from our projects, live in the moment, and renew ourselves before returning to the telic struggle. “I just TAKE my moral holidays,” says James, for the most practical of reasons: I NEED them. They’re good for us!
There are countless ways to take a moral holiday, depending on your personal nature and predilections. Watching the World Series (and reading about it, thanks to my wife’s recent gift of Tyler Kepner’s book) is one of mine. (Last night’s Game 1 was thrilling and, uncannily, twelve years to the day since David Freese demoralized the Rangers in the 11th inning of Game 6.)
We’re about to pick up Life is Hard again, in my Intro classes. Students these days do seem to be finding everyday life, routine social encounters, and general uncertainty about the future (well, more the present in fact) pretty hard to handle. Setiya’s philosophy can help. James’s too. Walk it off.
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Jungian happiness
October 28, 2023Carl (not Josh) Jung – How To Be Happy
“Know your shadow… Nurture relationships…”
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HCR on NRA
October 27, 2023Yet another predictably enervating mass shooting in America, in yet another undeserving "special place." History judges.
"…Maine governor Janet Mills has personal ties to Lewiston, where she worked, met her late husband, and sent their daughters to school. "Lewiston is a special place," she wrote today. "It is a closeknit community with a long history of hard work, of persistence, of faith, of opening its big heart to people everywhere.
"I love this place, just as I love our whole state with my entire heart. I am so deeply saddened. This city did not deserve this terrible assault on its citizens, on its peace of mind, on its sense of security. No city does. No state. No people."
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Growing up takes courage
October 26, 2023And luck—the luck of a wise and timely uncle-figure, portly or otherwise, who'll teach you something about meliorism in the real world. Susan Neiman is herself such a (non-portly) figure in "Why Grow Up…"—
"Growing up is more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned–principally through the experience of watching others use it well–but it cannot be taught. Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule. Courage is not only required to learn how to trust your own judgement rather than relying on your state's, your neighbour's or your favourite movie star's. (Of course, your state, your neighbour or your favourite movie star may often be right, and good judgement requires you to recognize that.) Even more important, courage is required to live with the rift that will run through our lives, however good they may be: ideals of reason tell us how the world should be; experience tells us that it rarely is. Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two–without giving up on either one.
Most of us are tempted to give up on one or the other. People who stick to the dogmas of childhood can spend whole lifetimes denying that the world does not conform to beliefs they hold dear. While examples of these abound–certain preachers and politicians come to mind–in our day it's more common to meet people who are stuck in the mire of adolescence. The world turns out not to reflect the ideas and ideals they had for it? All the worse for ideals. Maintaining ideals in a world that seems to have no use for them becomes a source of disappointment, even shame. Far better to jettison them entirely than to suffer the memory of hope defeated; far braver to face the depth of the rot of reality than to cling to what turned out to be illusion.
Such a standpoint is less brave than you think, for it demands absolutely nothing but an air of urbanity. Far more courage is needed to acknowledge that both ideals and experience make equal claims on us. Growing up is a matter of respecting those claims and meeting them as best you can, knowing you will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. If you live long enough, each will probably tempt you. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way that it should be, while never losing sight of the way that it is, is what being a grown-up comes to. If you happen to have a portly uncle who taught you that, you are very lucky."
— Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age by Susan Neiman
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A dream? Or a vision?
October 25, 2023The conclusion of "News from Nowhere"—
"I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all; and trying to consider if I was overwhelmed with despair at finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not so despairing.
Or indeed WAS it a dream? If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle?
All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them: as though the time would come when they would reject me, and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, "No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness."
Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."
— News from Nowhere(Annotated & illustrated) by William Morris
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Why Grow Up
October 25, 2023
Maturity doesn’t have to mean disenchantment. “Savor every second,” says Susan Neiman…
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Up@dawn 