One happy summer day, years ago now, I went blueberry picking with my eleven year old grandson. He was all over the place, leaping from bush to bush, getting scratched up in the brambles, telling me about this, then telling me about that – enthusiastically imparting whole bunches of information, each item related to another, and very interesting to hear.
As we walked home down the hill, I said
“I notice that you haven’t been taking your ADHD medication for the last couple of days.”
“That’s right. I haven’t – and do you know why?”
“No, tell me,” I answered.
“It’s that I like the way my mind leaps around between this and that. One thing gives me an idea about another other; when things bounce up against each other, they take me along into whole new places.”
That fruit (I also have ADHD) does not fall far from the tree. I told him about an article I once wrote called “Spinning Among Fields,” based on the story of how different kinds of sheep took to leaping over fences from one pasture to another, leaving all kinds of wool stuck in the wires so that spinners who came along after them found wool to blend into all kinds of new colors and textures.
“That’s ME,” shouted my grandson, tearing gleefully down the hill in a whirl of skipping and leaping.
I am currently reading a book by the physicist Carlo Rovelli, who argues against the idea that important scientific discoveries always contradict previous assumptions. There is something of Aristotle’s theory of gravity in Galileo, and there are elements suggesting quantum theory in Einstein. It is in the places where theories abut each other that important breakthroughs occur:
“The borders between theories, disciplines, eras, cultures, peoples and individuals are remarkably porous, and our knowledge is fed by the exchanges across this highly permeable spectrum.”
Or, as Krista Tippett puts it, “Wisdom and wholeness emerge in a moment like this when human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay.” There is a problem, however, This kind of interstitial thinking can really irritate people who like to think one thing at a time and are fond of either/or categories. It got me into all kinds of trouble in a viciously territorial academic world that values loyally clinging to separate disciples, and you see it, more grimly, in the intransigence of power/over people like white supremacists who resist functioning as one among a variety of races.
The tangential talkers in our family drive our linear thinkers to distraction as we leap from topic to topic in a conversational style they call “always changing the subject.” So, with profound apologies to them (we have thrashed this all out and are working to communicate better when we are all together), I will be getting on with my wool gathering.
I have always assumed that human evolution was brutal, a matter of the survival of the fittest, with only the meanest and strongest among us getting to reproduce. What do you know? According to Rutger Bregman in Humankind: a Hopeful History,* it’s not that way at all. Instead of evolving to be ferocious, we have evolved to be loveable. Here is a useful outline of Bregman’s theory that we have evolved as Homo Puppy.
“Our brains are smaller than those of some of our predecessors, our teeth and jaws are more childlike and partly because of that we have become great in cooperating: we have become hypersocial learning machines,
We are born to learn, connect and play and that makes us strong as a species.
The Homo Puppy has an antenna that is continuously tuned to others. We are good in connecting to other people and we enjoy doing it, consciously as well as subconsciously; emotions are leaking out of our bodies all the time, waiting to be picked up by the other puppies.
Our minds need contact in the same way as our bodies need food.”
Bregman prefers Rousseau’s theory that we were better off in “a state of nature” to Hobbes’ and Machiavelli’s belief in an existential human nastiness that is only kept in check by a thin veneer of “civilization.” He is skeptical “of the notion that human beings are inherently selfish, or worse, a plague upon the earth. I’m skeptical when this notion is peddled as ‘realistic,’ and I’m skeptical that there’s no way out.”
He demonstrates the “way out” in historical examples when, instead of acting at our very worst in times of great danger, we act out of community-mindedness, kindness, and mutual cooperation. Agreeing with Gustave Le Bon’s theory in The Psychology of the Masses that civilized behavior crumbles in the face of catastrophe, Hitler thought he bombing the hell out of their cities would easily undermine British morale.
However, the cooperative behavior of Londoners, accomplished in a mood of mutuality, courage and care for each other in the face of horrific danger, proved the opposite. Nevertheless, both Churchill and Eisenhower bought Le Bon’s argument, though their carpet-bombing of German cities produced the same result of deepening community ties, morale, and solidarity. (And, then, consider Putin’s “ten-days-and-it’s-over” presumptions about Ukraine).
William Golding, in his 1954 Lord of the Flies, adheres to belief in our propensity to social evil, a personal bias that Bregman refutes in telling what actually happened when six boarding-school boys survived on an island for a year in 1966: they cared for each other, invented fair rules for dividing up chores, and came up with reasonable punishments for misconduct while devising cooperative methods for hunting, fishing, and gathering fresh water.
Humankind is structured on a series of similar examples that demonstrate how our puppy-like geniality (manifest in the evolution of our appealingly rounded eyes, our ability to make eye contact with each other, and the distinctly human tendency to blush with shame) result in a complex social wiring enhanced through our development of language and our delight in learning things from each other.
Bergman hypothesizes that their (puppyish) eagerness to trade with and even leave their bands to join others, enhanced by their curiosity and copycat propensities, are the reasons why our hunting and gathering ancestors prevailed. Although Neanderthals had much bigger brains than ours, our social/linguistic skills and propensity for learning from each other may have been the key to how we lived through the onset of harsher climate conditions.
The problem with civilization is that it brought ownership, then rivalry over what was owned, and then misery for those who owned less or were cut out of owning anything. Bregman finds operating on a hierarchical power/over rather than the community power/with basis tragically corruptive: People in power “literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant and rude than average,” they cheat and are shameless and loose the capacity to blush. . .Power works like an anaesthetic that makes you insensate to other people” and see them “in a negative light.”
When sociopathic autocrats call the shots, puppy-like communities can morph into ferocious packs. By the time a regime’s propaganda machines have done their work on us, along with threats of torture and execution at the least appearance of dissent, it is no wonder that we do what we are told. Bregman, however, sees the “just following orders” argument, as used at the Eichmann trials, as a short-sighted iteration of the veneer theory; he posits something more (tragically) puppy-like as the motivation which made high level Nazi officials devise, and then carry out, the precise, viciously evil workings of the Holocaust.
Bregman suggests that, though his psychopathic antisemitism was searingly evident, Hitler’s orders were actually so vague that officers like Eichmann chose to act within “a culture of one-upmanship in which increasingly radical Nazis devised increasingly radical measures to get in Hitler’s good graces.” In other words, years and years of the propaganda machine had brainwashed the German military into thinking that killing Jews was an act of personal virtue. Bregman argues that Hannah Arendt’s understanding of “just obeying orders” has been misinterpreted: she “was one of those rare philosophers who believe that most people, deep down, are decent. She argued that our need for love and friendship is more human than any inclination towards hate or violence. And when we do choose the path of evil, we feel compelled to hide behind lies and cliches that give us a semblance of virtue. Eichmann was a prime example: he’d convinced himself he’d done a good deed, something historic for which he’d be admired by future generations.” In other words, he was so eager to wag his tail for Hitler that he did profoundly evil things in order to please him. Clearly, homo-puppyness does not always lead to a good outcome: it can embroil us into a “negative spiral [that] can also factor into deeper societal evils like racism, gang rape, honor killings, support for terrorists and dictatorial regimes, even genocide.” And so, our evolution as tail-waggers has its dark side if we copycat ourselves into conformity with systems of injustice.
During the years of the Weimer Republic, Hitler had replaced the Rule of Law with a despotic antisemitism and diktats against dissent. As a remedy, the nations that won World War II used the Nuremberg trials to establish international standards to prohibit crimes against humanity, including “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population.”
Shamefully, both the United States and the USSR left their ongoing crimes against humanity out of the new international formula: “The final version of the charter limited the tribunal’s jurisdiction over crimes against humanity to those committed as part of a war of aggression.” Both the United States—concerned that its “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation not be labeled a crime against humanity, and the Soviet Union, wanted to avoid giving an international court jurisdiction over a government’s treatment of its own citizens.”
The problem for Homo Sapiens today is that, if such self-interested, piecemeal compliance prevents out adhering to environmental covenants like the Paris Agreement, we may not be able to save the human race from global warming. In order to prevail, we will have to undertake an unnaturally swift evolutionary leap to a global homo-puppyhood that accepts the whole planet as our commons. Is this too much to hope? Or will our devotion to charismatic dictators and their propaganda appeals to a narrow and destructive self-interest lead to a far more tragic outcome?
Here’s Rutger Bregman’s take: “There is no reason to be fatalistic about civil society. We can choose to organize our cities and states in new ways that will benefit everyone. The curse of civilization can be lifted. Will we manage to do so? Can we survive and thrive in the long run? Nobody knows.”
*Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History. Little Brown & Co: NY 2019
After a long, dry stretch in a particularly reserved (okay, anally retentive) academic department where I felt that my humanity was being drained out of me through my toes, I wrote a poem asking “Did anyone ever die for lack of gossip?” I answered myself that “We are born for a web of words, an embracing patter,” and then I threw my Full Professorship out of the window to find a more socially nourishing life.
From birth, we live in a rich matrix of other people talking to us and to each other. As toddlers, we begin to formulate our replies within that context of interactive chatter; by the time we are six we are skilled linguistic manipulators within our particular social milieu.
Chattering generates mattering: we figure out our place in our world through verbality. Feral children raised without language – let’s say by wolves – communicate in wolf submission gestures, taking their correct place in the pack on hunts, and in growls and grunts, but remain poorly wolf-socialized because they lack non-verbal wolf information like smell – the enormously detailed array of scents wolves respond to – and the multiple meanings that a tail can express. If rescued, it is often too late for feral children to acquire human language and live fully as humans.
A lone wolf ejected from the pack for bad behavior is not likely to survive on its own. American culture, in contrast, often considers an individual the center of the universe, despite our Surgeon General’s warning that the current plague of isolation leads not only to mental but also to bodily disease (apparently, we canactually die from lack of gossip).
Our development of language, with the evolutionary outcome of a larger and more complex neo-cortex than other animals, enables us to transmit a considerable body of how-to and what’s-it-all-about information among each other and down the generations. For many millennia after we came down from the trees, we did this by word of mouth, orally. Think of the West African Griot, responsible for keeping centuries of tribal history and genealogy in his head; of “Homer,” who was actually a group of people writing down a cluster of epic narratives; or of the New Testament Gospels, stories told in the Christian communities that remained oral for most of the first century after the life of Jesus.
Unfortunately, this treasure of human knowledge can be used for evil as well as good: it all depends on that ambivalent human gift, the gift of choice. At the beginning of the twentieth century, we assumed that our bright new technologies would, in and of themselves, lead to human progress. Silly us: we got a century of total war. As Justin Gregg puts it in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals about Human Stupidity: “If Nietzsche had been born a narwhal the world might never have had to endure the horrors of the Second World War or of the Holocaust.” Unlike animals, which seem to know what they are doing, human beings – for all of our linguistic skills and our museums and libraries and symphonies – are tragically prone to muck things up.
Gossip is that way too: talking about whose mother called, what he said, then what she said can lead to kind understanding or turn toxic in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, we can’t live without it: we feel all creepy crawly if we go even one day without talking to someone. So, if you live alone, like me, find somebody to chat with today, even if it is a familiar stranger like the check-out lady at the supermarket; she probably hankers to verbalize just as much as you do.
I belong to a little group of friends who meet every month to check in with each other’s lives and discuss a topic like “silence” or “hospitality” or “compassion.” This January, it was “Paradigm Changes.” Wouldn’t you know it, we decided that each of us would select a way we were doing things and change it, for which purpose we used a “30 Day Challenge” chart with “Every Day I Will…” at the top and 30 little squares to record our progress. Does it sound like New Year’s Resolutions to you? It did to me, so I resolved to choose something light-hearted – to cultivate a (child-like) beginner’s mind.
It’s a core teaching of Buddhism, having to do with being entirely present in each moment the way we used to get so caught up in our play that everything else vanished from our minds. One of Buddhism’s ways of cultivating this state is to look at everything you encounter through the bandbox fresh, brand-new eyes of a child.
The trouble is, this winter proved a hard time to be light-hearted. It turned out to be one of those grim, grey Januarys we often have in Michigan, with no sun whatsoever plus sheets and sheets of cold, hard rain – a challengingly bleak time to cultivate childhood joy. Or, “if there is no self, then whose arthritis is this?”
So I did little things, like bet myself I wouldn’t see a single patch of blue driving home through the murk, and then click my mental heels when I saw one. (It turns out that this isn’t a very smart thing to do with your foot on the accelerator, so I resolved to have my moments of hilarity when I wasn’t driving.) When I heard a lovely flute piece on the living room radio I would attempt a jig; when a Tufted Titmouse alit on my feeder I stopped and stared, and jumped with joy when children tore whooping around the playground. There was a huge snowfall, delightful in its dazzle (until tree branches started falling all over my yard); I got excited in a blissfully child-like way the next morning when I saw determined little possum tracks etched in the new snow, punctuated by a tail dragging along between them.
In spite of my friends still catching covid and my being in a high-risk group, I resolved to return to a few small local museums to experience the joy of finding something that delights me – most often a blazingly bright minimalist abstraction – before which to stand and stare. Look what I found!
I Sometimes stumble upon things at an art show that are just plain funny. There was an hilarious juxtaposition of installations where I laughed and laughed and took this picture:
After I posted it on our neighborhood newsletter, I got a furious repost demanding how could I be so insensitive as to promulgate a rape scene? Gentle reader, look again: the stuffed people are facing upward after apparently falling over backwards on top of each other, and that’s why the little boy from the other installation finds the whole thing (like I do) hilarious.
Cultivating one’s (long-lost) inner child involves returning, after years and years of heavily responsible adulthood, to a “beginner’s mind.” I tried to think of something I could get up to that was beginnerish in that way ? When I was seven years old I hit a mischievous streak in my otherwise rule-abiding life: I founded a Mischief Club with my best friend. to startle people – like jumping over their jump ropes in the middle of a game or moving their belongings to somebody else’s locker.
When a childhood friend (who had witnessed my Mischief Club phase ) turned up in town and asked me to stop by her motel, I decided it would be fun to engage in some mild social mischief. Although Lilybet comes from a family of rather reserved folks, she has a raucous sense of humor and a flair for writing and reciting limericks.
So I put of a couple of limericks in my pocket and drove to her hotel, where I found her on a sofa in the foyer flanked by relatives. Determined to carry out my resolution to be as silly as possible, I sat down with her and, instead of having the organ-recital about our ailments my crowd usually indulge in, I read her one of my limericks:
Way back in the 1940s
We were told it was always naughty
If we ever blew our noses
Anywhere on our own clotheses.
Nice girls in the 1950s
Always used our handkerchiefties
That is why I think it’s not
Nice to fill your sleeves with snot.
We hugged and jiggled and simply howled with laughter while, would you believe it, the relatives laughed right along with us!
People wrote down questions and voted on which to discuss. Th questions were:
What is consciousness; are animals conscious?
Can animals be people?
What is wisdom?
What is death?
and Why does Suffering Exist, which was the winner.
The conversation moves all around the table, with me as facilitator, calling on people when a turn opens up and interjecting my own comments here and there. Here’s how it went:
The word “why” appears in the question – this suggests that there a reason for pain?
Existentialists don’t think so – to them, it’s all random happenstance.
How about evolution? You learn what to avoid if you feel pain, so you survive to reproduce. But what if you can tolerate more pain than other people: isn’t that an evolutionary advantage too? On the one hand, you need to know what to avoid. On the other hand, Stoic endurance might have some genetic usefulness if it is passed on.
Is pain physical- of the body- or can it be emotional, or both? When you are in emotional pain does it take the form of bodily sensations (stomach aches, headaches?) What emotions are engendered by physical pain?
How about people who are perpetually consumed by their victimhood, even when the emotional or physical trauma occurred way back in their lives?
Can pain be transcended by thinking and talking about it? What role does conscious acceptance that suffering is part of life play, given that so many people think that life is supposed to be easy? How about talk therapy for emotional pain?
Do religious systems “rationalize” pain? How about Buddhism, with its belief that pain is a given if we exist, and Christianity with its teaching that suffering is redemptive? Is “rationalizing” in the sense of explaining pain and suffering as part of an overall “why” useful? Does it lessen pain to give it this kind of meaning? Does experiencing pain within a system of meaning mitigate it?
How about the question “How Could a Good God Let There Be So Much Pain in the World?” A Judeo-Christian answer is that life in the material world consists of random happenings and that God so values our decision-making capacities and wouldn’t want to govern our fates as if we were puppets. God grieves for our bad decisions and delights in our good ones. A Buddhist answer might be that pain is the way the world goes but we can control our responses to it through meditation and compassion for each other.
Victor Frankl wrote that he found meaning during the holocaust by thinking about what it would be like outside the concentration camp if he survived for a future after it, and by taking day to day actions helping other inmates. His take suggests that “hopelessness” is what makes pain unbearable and that hope for the future, plus present-time compassion for his fellow prisoners, is what got him through.
Review of Ward Farnsworth, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook. Boston: Godine, 2021
It is not very popular to be an intellectual in America today. My husband and I, both college professors, were careful not to draw our neighbors’ attention to our status lest they hold back their friendship. And now, country-wide distrust has been fired up by the idea that intellectuals inevitably condescend to ordinary people and that neither facts nor reasoning are to be trusted.
The problem is, I become more and more intellectual as I get older. Some years ago, having read Christopher Phillip’s Socrates Café about the discussions he holds in nursing homes, schools, prisons and public parks, I decided to solve my problem by convincing friends and neighbors that they were just as intellectual as I, and that it would be fun to have philosophical discussions with each other.
In my Socrates Café, I make a firm distinction between an opinion and a thought, and I always insist that you can’t engage in thinking if you are opinionated. (see https://bit.ly/3jtmQ2b),Most people are pleased to think things through, although I had to dissolve a Socrates Café at a senior center when, week after week, discussants refused to abandon their opinions about immigrants and people of color.
In Socrates, Farnsworth finds a perpetual questioner of “the commonplace. the acceptance of traditional opinions and current sentiments as an ultimate fact.” People feel good expressing their opinions in a pushy way, but it is precisely this kind of bold assertion that Socrates questions. “Questions and answers are the sound of thought happening. An essay or lecture is usually the sound of a thought having happened.”
In asking one question after another Socrates is a skeptic, a word whose root means “inquiry” and which involves less of the modern “disdainfully doubtful” connotation than a person who “inquires without reaching a conclusion. Skeptics don’t say ‘no’ to every claim, or indeed to any of them. They just keep asking questions. They want the truth, and are always trying to get closer to it, but they never reach a stopping point; they never find certainty. They have a dread of ‘rash assent’ and of thinking that you’re done thinking before you really are.”
I have noticed that people really like it when you question yourself in front of them: You can’t come across as intellectually condescending when you display skepticism about your own opinions!
When you apply the Socratic method to yourself, you arrive at a state of mind which Socrates calls Aporia. “You realize that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand.” Once you learn to do this, you can help other people get there, and that is why, pursued in a non-judgmental, non-interruptive manner, the Socratic method has a lot of promise for the hard-held opinions that endanger American democracy today
* * *
Let’s give it a try with a guy who “doesn’t believe in facts”:
G(uy). Global Warming is a hoax made up by the democrats. It isn’t a fact – it’s propaganda.
Q. How about in your personal life? Do you use facts there?
G. What do you mean?
Q. Well, just for an example, how did you decide on the best commute to work today?
G. I started with a map when I first got the job, but as I went on, I worked out some shortcuts to make it quicker
Q. What did the map tell you?
G. Which roads intersected, distances – things like that.
Q. How did you work out the shortcuts?
G. I found some side roads, and then tested the route with my watch.
Q. Were the roads on the map and the timing you worked out based on facts?
G. Yes, but those aren’t the made-up kind.
Q. So you trust some facts, but not others?
G. Obviously!
Q. How about weather reports – do you trust those?
G. They are pretty accurate most of the time.
Q. Who does those weather reports?
G. The news, tv shows
Q. Where do they get their facts.
G. They get them from meteorologists.
Q. So you trust the accuracy of weather reports because they are given by trained meteorologists?
G. Yes.
Q. Do you know where the reports on Global Warming come from?
G. Of course: the democrats – Biden and his elite east coast friends who look down at us and want to ruin our economy.
Q. Do you think the inftense new hurricanes, wildfires, deluges, droughts and heat waves are really happening?
G. Yes.
Q. Why?
G. I see them on TV and we had a whole week of really heavy rain ourselves last spring.
Q. Was your house okay?
G. Yes, though the porch floated away.
Q. So your direct observation tells you that those kinds of storms are facts?
G. Yes, but they are not caused by humans: that’s the hoax!
Q. (summarizing): Okay, I see where you are coming from: you trust maps and your own observations of the closest route to work – which means that you trust your own reasoning from obvious facts. You trust what Meteorologists report about weather because it lines up with the facts you see on TV and with your own experience. On the other hand, you don’t trust what meteorologists and climate scientists tell you about the causes of Global Warming. I am not sure how one set of facts that you trust differs from the set of facts you don’t trust?
* * *
What do you think? Is it working? If not, why not? And then what? Do you think there is room for using the Socratic method in everyday life?
A Review of Michael Schur, How to be Perfec: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.
I took an Introduction to Philosophy in college – my father and my brother majored in it, and I wanted to see what it was about. What it was about was boring. The teacher wasn’t particularly inspired and never engaged us in the philosophical issues she droned on about. Besides, at that age I didn’t really care about what Socrates or Aristotle, Kant or Bentham felt was so vitally important.
I didn’t see the point of establishing my ethics for everyday living because I hadn’t done a whole lot of everyday living. Butnow! After a life filled with the vicissitudes (and joys) of marriage, parenthood, teaching, community organizing and political activism I know what I stand for, though I still struggle to avoid undercutting my integrity by failing to live up to it.
That’s where Michael Schur’s How to be Perfec: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question comes in. The fact that Schur is a tv comedy writer (Parks and Recreation) and is funny even when he is carrying on about categorical imperatives and existential anxiety convinced me to read the whole thing this summer, very slowly.
Here’s the kind of ethical conundrum that typically gets my moral knickers in a twist. We have a community homeless shelter where I drop in with fresh fruit to supplement the hot lunches. I often chat with whoever has come off the streets that day: I have a rule for myself that if a guest wants to talk I will stop running all over town like a chicken with my head chopped off and take time for a conversation.
The other day I brought a bunch of grapes and stopped to greet a guy I often chat with, who was disconsolately slumped over his chair.
“Lunch smells good,” I said.
“Would you sit down and eat it with me,” he asked.
He had been in the shelter all day with his mask below his nose, and I am at a high risk category for covid. In order to break bread with him we would both have to take our masks off.
“I am really sorry,” I said, “I have another errand.”
I chose between his good and my good, and I am still unhappy with myself about it. So is he: he has gone off me, no longer eager for my company.
That’s why I like Schur’s less than perfec (sic) take on the struggle to live up to our moral responsibilities: “Again, part of the project of this book is to help us accept failure – because, again, failure is the inevitable result of caring about morality and trying to be good people. I really don’t mean to argue for perfect living…because a) it’s impossible and b) I don’t even think it’s a good goal. Instead, I’m arguing that when we fail, in matters great or small, we just take a second to acknowledge our failure to ourselves, and try to remember that failure the next time we have a decision to make.”
He devotes the first eighty pages of his book to “various theories of how to be good people.”
Deontology – Emmanuel Kant: Arrive at your rules for moral behavior through reasoning, as long as they work as well for others. My personal ethics told me to eat with the guy at the shelter, but, the very next day, I was joining my daughters and grandsons for our summer vacation. Taking a risk on his behalf could in put me and my whole family at risk. Or, my (Kantian) categorical imperative of being there when people ask me to was undercut because it might not work out well for others.
Utilitarianism – John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Make decisions that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Take my monetary donations to that shelter: arguing from quantitative analysis, shouldn’t I donate to groups whose intent is to eradicate homelessness (and poverty) altogether?
Contractualism – T.M. Scanlon (Author of What We Owe to Each Other): Make ethical decisions based on what we need to do to live with other people. What we owe each other is more qualitative and emotional than quantitative and mathematical, therefore “Living with other people” backs my choice to support “bricks and mortar” programs in my own neighborhood rather than distant charities.
Virtue Ethics – Aristotle: what are virtues? Which values do we want to live by, how to we find the golden mean in enacting them that is neither too little or too much? There are two aspects of Aristotle’s ethics that are the touchstone for my decision-making: first, that life does not consist of ideas but of action; secondly, matching your acts to your values brings life’s greatest happiness; being at one with yourself brings you a sense of wholeness, true flourishing as a human being.
Existentialism – Sartre: don’t look for a meaning in life there isn’t any. There is no source outside of you where you can find moral values: you have to make your own choices (while being sure they are good for others too.) Camus: Life is absurd; accept human absurdity and try to make good individual choices anyway.
I used Schur’s philosophical categories to sort out the basis for my life choices. I have come to consider the universe fundamentally moral, so I go with Kant. Utilitarianism leaves me (emotionally) chilled; though I have to admit that basing your charitable giving on algorithmically sorted data and quantitative accounting makes plenty of (rational) sense.
In choosing my actions I have never been a loner, but always join in the social contracts of the organizations where I volunteer: there is my (Unitarian) church’s covenant to principles, for example, and the stated rules that the Citizens’ Climate Lobby adheres to. And there is our United States Constitution and our Rule of Law, about which I am passionate.
As for Existentialism – when I fell into it during the (mercifully few) depressions I suffered, existential anxiety and a sense that life held no meaning whatsoever undermined my entire (Kantian/Contractual/Aristotelian) process of moral reasoning to leave me disastrously adrift on life’s tumultuous seas, without a rudder.
One of the truly lovely things about living (as often as possible) by integrity is that your ethics have a way of making themselves available at a (non-deliberative) second’s notice. A moment suddenly arrives when I realize that I must stand up for my values, right then and right there. Trembling all over, I get up on my feet to speak my piece for what I think is right and good, and experience what Aristotle described as true human flourishing – a great and all-pervading feeling, a warm bolt of complete happiness that rises from the tips of my toes and shoots up my spine to the top of my head as, once again, I head for good trouble.
It is so hard to pick up my newspaper in the morning and read nothing but horror stories! Here is my suggestion about making a silk purse of constructive action out of the sow’s ear of Replacement Theory: https://bit.ly/3y5QUsY
Have you heard about courts endowing nature entities like rivers, wetlands, and even rice as “persons” with inherent rights? I am fascinated by this concept from an ecological point of view. Isn’t it anthropomorphism to accord humanity to beings who are utterly different from humans? Doesn’t this natural beings-as-persons approach value human beings over nature, which is how we got out of balance with nature in the first place?
As lots of us are doing during this latest Covid lock-down, I was having a big sort-out of old papers when I came across a pile of “Dear Socratians” meeting reminders. During these homebound days and long winter evenings, it might be fun for you to discuss some of our philosophical ideas around your supper tables or, if you live alone like me, inside of your own head.
Most people are alarmed at the idea of philosophical discussions because they sound so academic and “intellectual,” but Christopher Phillips holds his lively conversations at every kind of venue – school classrooms, prisons, senior centers, and right out in the street – where ordinary people get caught up in issues they have always wanted to discuss. As Ward Farnsworth notes in The Socratic Method, Socrates “was the first to show that life affords scope for philosophy in every moment, in every detail, in every feeling and circumstance whatsoever.”
As a facilitator using Christopher Phillips’ methods, my first task is to get people to stop expressing opinions instead of thoughts:
Dear Socratians,
At our last meeting we decided not to express what we have already made up our minds about (opinions) but reframe our ideas as philosophical questions (thoughts). We had a good start discussing the limits of human choice, but, when abortion came up, things got a lot less rational.
When our emotions are roused, the neo-cortex can be overwhelmed by the mammalian brain – all fright and flight. Thus an issue that we are already angry about or personally shaken by is going to subvert the rational tone of our discourse.
Let’s work on proposing questions that we haven’t already made up our minds about. That way, we can develop our little oasis of reason in this contentious world.
Dear Socratians,
We avoid political and religious questions because these are so contentious. If we really need to ask them, how can we find calmer ways to approach them? In a Socrates Café, almost any question can be fine-tuned so it can be examined in a philosophical way.
Example 1: When Timothy McVeigh was put to death, a person who wanted to discuss why this happened framed the question as “who owns human life?” In that way the group could look not only at the particular issue, but also at a wide range of o philosophically import ideas that were related.
Example 2: Soon after we went to war in Iraq, people wanted to talk about whether this was the appropriate course of action. To do so in a philosophical way, they framed the question as “What is a just war?”
Example 3: A group of Socrates Café members wanted to examine the “gay marriage” issue in a philosophical way. “What is an excellent marriage” let them discuss it in the broader context of the institution of marriage as a whole.
Dear Socratians,
Thanks for your questions! I wish we could discuss them all, but we will take a vote on just one for Sunday:
1. What brings you joy any time of the year?
2. What is intelligence, specifically defined? Is it part of a larger area of understanding? Is it broad or narrow like engineering?
3. What is courage?
4. We know about physical illness. We know about mental illness. Is it possible to have soul sickness? How would you describe it?
5. Do words mean different things depending on who says them?
Dear Socratians,
Everyone seems to think that human beings invented mathematics. But how do you account for the “Golden Ratio,” the fact that in the spiral of a nautilus shell or the ratio between rows on a sunflower head display identical formulas?
The sea snail and the sunflower evolved before we did, didn’t they? What do you make of the fact that they contained discernable mathematical algorithms before human beings evolved? Is the universe mathematical?
Dear Socratians,
Sometimes in the dark hours of the night, or in the middle of yet another chaotic day, most of us have asked ourselves “what is this all about? Is Covid 19 entirely random? Is everything on earth just whirling about every which way, with no rhyme or reason?”
I have been thinking about Stoicism lately. This ancient Greek way of life takes the things we can’t control – our health, random catastrophes, the contradictions and setbacks of economies and careers – and separates them from what we can control, which is our attitude and our choice of action.
Is Stoicism too strenuously selfless for you? You might consider Cynicism, also a classical philosophy, but this one is based on the idea that people only pursue their individual self-interest and that social norms are ridiculous. Nor will your life as a Cynic be entirely taken up with sneering – the name derives from “dog” and it’s a dog’s life you will live doing your own thing, like chasing your tail and lazing around in the sun all day long.
Dear Socratians,
In the school of philosophy called cynicism you get to be skeptical about everything and to live all careless of outcomes, like a dog.
I thought you cat lovers might like to know that there is a feline school of philosophy as well.
“Rather than groping for meaning in a universe that offers none, we sure try to be more like cats, creatures that are congenitally happy being themselves…(fostering) contemplation-a mode of perception that fosters equanimity – and offers a scheme for emulating the catlike qualities that might permit us to thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.”
The question is, aren’t these just as canine as feline qualities, or are cats more “contemplative” than dogs?
Dear Socratians,
There is a kind of philosophizing you could call “short-term” in that it takes place inside a single figure of speech. For example, look at antitheses, which are words expressing an idea one way in one phrase and another (usually opposite) in the second:
“The United States Right long ago rejected evidence-based policy in favor of policy-based evidence.”
“Intelligence isn’t knowing everything. It’s the ability to challenge everything you know.”
“We must not forget that it is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.”
Try writing one – they are fun (like eating peanuts).
Dear Socratians,
Thanks for your questions! I am looking forward to seeing which one you vote for on Sunday:
1. What makes us human?
2. What does it mean to have a conscience?
3. When does freedom turn into license to do any and all things?
4. If we can process the death of cats, dogs, and elephants, why do we have such a hard time defining and coping with human death?
5. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Would you like to attend one of our meetings? They are the third Sunday of the month at 2PM, currently on Zoom. Just email me to avpratt@aol.com and I will send you a Dear Socratian reminder.
