Alain de Botton - On Pessimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.
In line with my fascination with de Botton's writing and thought, here is a secular sermon he gives.
Posts to follow on my thoughts about making a secular religion.
WARNING: this is on pessimism. if you are in a good mood and don't want to start feeling a little, well, you know, not so, I suggest listening to this later.
I’ve been in a Political Science and Philosophy graduate reading group this semester and it has been a very interesting experience. First off, we use the same words to say different things. Secondly, there is a drastic difference in writing style from one discipline to the other. Thirdly, we have differing ideas of an agent’s (loosely speaking, people and institutions made up of people) relative importance as it corresponds to an overarching structure.
A talk today was given by Kathyrn Sikkink over her book The Justice Cascade. The premise is that a new model is needed to understand political change, and specifically in this case, the drive to punish individual heads of state for human rights violations.
This stance is novel for a couple reasons. One, heads of state are usually immune after their regime or they leave power for the crimes they committed. Two, state sovereignty is not usually violated. International courts can prosecute current heads of state for violations (with varying degrees of success of course). So what accounts for this paradigm shift.
In short, norms about harm, revenge, human rights, and notions of sovereignty come into play. The Justice Cascade is the diffusion of these norms more globally. These ideas are ignored by traditional constructivist political scienctists because ideas and agents are too small and unimportant compared to the structures they inhabit.
Not so anymore. Media, new and old, is more and more global. There is a reason China keeps a lock on social networking sites. Ideas can be disseminated quickly with minimal effort. What someone wrote about justice in France can be read by someone in Libya. When dissidents in Syria are struggling to find the words or the frame work for their cause, they can read and discuss the uprisings in Tunisia.
Technology is an interesting new factor, becoming a channel for the old norms we in the west have lived by and transmitting them elsewhere. This would be a more interesting line of thought to follow.
Why Historical preservation?
It’s about more than just sites and history. The history and the sites provide a context. Concepts, ideas, truth, many things are understood only when they are in a context. Meaning is given in a context. Without that context we lose site of what is meant, what is real.
Digital preservation of physical reality is another step in saving and preserving the human context and history. It’s a mapping of the human cultural genome (borrowing the phrase from another TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html). Our history and our sites give us the context to talk about what it is to be human.
My daughter’s sharp gasp made me wheel in place, looking for the source of her cry. My little girl, Laura, had tripped over a root that looped up through the frozen earth. A light dusting of frost highlighted the gnarled ridges. Many of these roots broke the surface of the path we were walking on. It ran straight like an old rail road bed through the trees and small hills on either side. It wasn’t wide enough to walk side by side on and my daughter had been behind me when she fell.
Laura was already up and brushing the dirt off her jeans. Her narrow face smiled at me to let me know it was ok, she was just surprised. Her straight black hair was hidden under a gray stocking cap that I had once worn when I was in college. It dwarfed her small head, but she liked wearing it. Her brown eyes, sparkling—like her mothers, almost shone out from under the hat.
“You don’t have to look so worried, dad,” I was, and always had been, thrown by the grown up sound to her speech. I suppose spending half of your life in and out of a hospital bed will make you grow up faster.
“I know sweetheart,” I tried to smile, “are you ok?”
She raised her small chin, frowning slightly. She hated when I fussed over her. As a parent, especially when she had been first born, I had been so afraid of screwing up somehow. My wife and I hadn’t been able to stop her crying one night and at our wits end had called my parents who lived in town. My father had come over and laid my daughter down in her crib. He placed his hand on her chest and almost instantly she stopped crying. I didn’t know whether to thank him or kill him.
We kept on walking through the chilly winter day. I’d loved this park as a kid. I used to go walking through the creeks when they weren’t frozen over, like they were now. We, my parents and I, would put on our boots and go stomping—well, I was the stomper—through the water. Those are some of my best memories as a kid. I wanted my daughter to have something happy like that to think about. Especially since tomorrow she goes back to the hospital.
I let her walk in front of me this time. She was so thin, legs like sticks, arms so skinny I was afraid they would break in half. If she didn’t have her mother’s attitude and self confidence I would be afraid the wind would blow her away. But like her mother, she would talk the wind down and stay firmly rooted in place.
It wasn’t a cold day—well yes it was cold, but not cold in the bone chilling Indiana way, that lancing ice feeling that went straight through the clothes and to the heart. The creek beds were still frozen, but most of the snow was receding, giving way to green grass below.
“Why does snow melt?” Laura suddenly asked.
“Oh,” I thought for a second, “when it gets warm enough the snow can’t stay frozen anymore, so it melts.”
“I know that,” she sounded half exasperated,”but why?”
“Oh,” how do you explain to a seven year old that heat gives energy to the water molecules so that the magnetic dipoles no longer align in a crystal lattice? So I just said that, hoping I at least sounded, as a father should, smart and knowledgeable.
“Do you know a lot, daddy?” she asked.
“I know a lot about some things, but not a lot about others.”
“Like women?”
“What!?”
“Mommy says you’re really smart, but dumb at figuring out women.”
I laughed, it was true. My wife had to pull the date request out of me, drop hints like atom bombs, and shake her head as I muddled through the appropriate steps. Laura is so much like her mother, assertive in spite of her size, sharp too.
We came to a foot bridge that spanned one of the frozen creeks. The ice was caught in motion, as if at any moment it would come back to life and flow over the rocks and down to the little waterfall further off. The brown bridge was made of wood with rails that came up to my waist and just under Laura’s chin. The sun was bright today and the tree branches caught the light and cast shadows in a crisscross pattern over the ground and creek bed.
Looking at Laura I saw her tracing something with her finger on the railing. She was standing on her toes and gazing intently, not at the woods or the creek bed, but at three characters, two letters and a rose.
“What are these for?” she never looked up from the letters, just traced with her finger.
“Oh, well, they are probably initials. They stand for names of two people. So your initial would be L.”
“Who were they?” she asked.
“I don’t know. They were probably boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“Like you and mom?”
“Well, that comes before marriage, usually. But yes, your mother and I were boyfriend and girlfriend once.”
“Did you write your initials anywhere?”
I thought about it for awhile. My wife and used to take long walks in the woods, though I never carved anything, “no, we hadn’t.”
“Why would people do that dad?” she stopped tracing the letters and looked out into the woods. Again, I waited a little before answering.
“I suppose, maybe, they wanted to have something to remember being together. By marking this bridge like this their initials won’t get erased. People will see this, like you did, and know that two people who were once together stood on this bridge. I guess it’s a way to make their mark on the world, a way to be remembered.”
“So why didn’t you do that?”
I laughed, “there was no way your mother would let either of us forget. We didn’t need to carve anything anywhere. We would remember.”
“Would people remember me if I did that?” her question cut into me like a knife blade. I kneeled down next to my daughter, looking at her face from the side. Her eyes never wavered from whatever she saw in the woods.
“Why do you say that?” I tried to keep my voice from cracking.
“I heard you and mom talking. I know I go back to the hospital tomorrow. Mom was crying, she said I wouldn’t be home for a long time. You were crying too, I think, but it sounded different. Mom sounds like me when I cry. You sound like you’re breathing heavy, like when you come back from running,” she still wouldn’t look at me, “you don’t know if I’ll get better. I want to know if I people will remember me.”
“Sweetheart,” a ten year old shouldn’t sound like that, like she’s been reading existential philosophy and is worried about leaving some indelible mark and being remembered. I barely remember what it was like to be ten, I think I was in fifth grade, maybe. Then again, at ten I hadn’t spent much of my life in a hospital bed between operations, reading voraciously—worse than me as a kid, which is saying something. She reads—and has read—most of my old books, the Dostoyevsky, the Faulkner, the Huxley, Eco. She must have gotten into the Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Tillich when I wasn’t looking.
“Sweetheart,” I tried again, “when did you hear us? We had that conversation late one night, you should have been in bed.”
“I know, but I couldn’t sleep. I heard you in the kitchen. I got scared.” She suddenly turned and hugged me, my beautiful baby girl, old before she should have been. I’d just gotten used to the idea of her being ten and no longer able to fit in the crook of my arm. I’d read her Whitman before she was born, lying next to her mother under the light of the reading lamp, marveling at the thought that there would be something of me, but separate from me, soon to enter the world. I had once thought that Whitman was praising himself overmuch, saying that he ‘contained multitudes’, though at your birth I think I understood. My baby girl, how can a father tell his daughter how beautiful the world can be, though let her experience it? It hurts, too. I joked with your mother once that you couldn’t date till you had your blackbelt. I was only half kidding.
“You will be ok,” I said, holding her tight, “the doctors will make it better. It’s their job to make you better.”
“They haven’t before,” how could my ten year old’s voice be so steady when mine wasn’t?
“I know, I know,” what could I say?
“Will you and mom remember me?” she pulled her head off my shoulder and looked into my eyes.
“Forever, I promise,” I said, “we love you, we could never forget you. We won’t have to remember you though because you will be here with us. It will be ok.”
[To Be Continued}
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Ok, so admittedly, not a very high brow post. However, Jon Stewart makes me laugh. Cheers to Friday.
Philosophy as a discipline has placed an emphasis on logos, rationality, in argument over ethos (view of the person) and pathos (look up), two concepts from the field of rhetoric. When philosophers debate it is supposed to be a discussion about the argument itself. Attacks on character, attacks against intentionally weak positions, and slippery slope arguments are all fallacies to be avoided, and the use of one in argument is enough to discredit the argument.
We are then surprised when we get involved in discussions outside of our ivory tower and no one takes the time to listen to our finely nuanced points, rather attacking characters, extraneous—to us anyway—features or points, instead of the argument itself. What have we missed?
Rhetoric, for the ancient Greeks, went hand in hand with philosophy. Aristotle wrote the classic text on rhetoric and public speaking as well as his books on poetry, ethics, politics, and early physics. Philosophy abandoned these other disciplines long ago. Philosophy lost touch and finds its style of argument outdated and ineffectual outside of academia or the journals and podcasts only other philosophers subscribe to.
And yet philosophers can be drawn into a heated emotional debate as easily as anyone. Walking past, for example, a display for antiabortion and seeing aborted fetuses six feet tall leaves a sour taste in our mouths. Our arguments, while well reasoned, seem flaccid when a six foot banner with a simple slogan stares us down. We’ve forgotten what rhetoric is, how powerful images are.
Rhetoric is its own discipline to be distinguished for ‘English’ degrees. Ph.Ds. in rhetoric study a variety of topics. One thing rhetoricians have known is humanity is guided as much by emotion as by rational thought. David Hume theorized as much when he said “rationality is, and should be, the slave of the passions”. Even the most cool headed of us are not immune to the brain numbing flash of anger or frustration at displays that refuse to play by our rules.
Activist groups are excellent visual rhetoricians. They learned that simple messages and powerfully charged images would do more to motivate a lay audience than nuanced argument.
So what does that mean for pure logos? Do we compromise? Give up on purely rational discourse?
NO. Of course not. However, we should remember something we’ve forgotten and that is context. There is a time and a place to do hard philosophy. When grounding theories and the like we should be true to our roots. It is what makes us who we are.
On the other hand, we need to take a page from rhetoric and keep in mind who our audience is. To do philosophy in the public sphere (as it should be done) requires laying aside our theoretic jargon. If philosophy is to be viable in the public sphere, then we should consider how what we say will have meaning in that arena.
Usually when someone thinks of an atheist they conceive of only one facet of the position. An atheist doesn’t believe in God/gods. Full stop. But that position is limiting. It doesn’t say anything about living, about what is valuable, etc. And not all atheists are atheists for the same reasons. There are many ways to be an atheist, or to hold non-theistic beliefs. I’ll touch on three broad categories I attribute to one of my philosophy TAs from college. The categories are metaphysically atheistic, morally atheistic, and existentially atheistic.
The category that most atheists seem to fall into (or are perceived to fall into) is metaphysical atheism that is they will unequivocally say that God/gods do not exist. There is no reality above the physical reality under the domain of the sciences (there may be qualifications, but this is the broad gloss). This kind of atheism is a denial of the supernatural reality of theistic views. Think of this as a sort of first step, basic atheism.
Being morally atheistic may seem ambiguous, but here is how I think of it. Another common argument is that without God there is no morality. It is an argument commonly misattributed to Dostoyevsky. If there is no God, then everything is permitted (this is actually Ivan Karamozov, a character in The Brothers Karamozov). To be morally atheistic is to believe that God is not required for morality. One can be moral and ethical without a theistic worldview. There are many philosophers who have written on this subject, starting with Aristotle and continuing through Singer, and still more. Naturalistic ethics is harder to ground, but many atheists have deeply moral worldviews that have nothing to do with a supernatural reality. Sometimes this is the reason they leave their churches in the first place.
The last category I will outline is existential atheism. As I understand this, to be existentially atheistic is to find no value in the existence of God. Even if God does exist, it wouldn’t change how I construe value and meaning in life. Value in life can come from a variety of places on this view. For many it stems from interaction with friends and family, experiences in the world, their work, etc.
In this way it is not so simple to just be an atheist. For example, I am a metaphysical agnostic. I am perfectly willing to accept that God might exist. Based on the evidence, inferences can go one-way or the other. Morally I am an atheist. I believe that one can lead a perfectly moral life without being a Christian. Existentially, I am an atheist as well. Regardless of the existence of God I don’t believe that God, if it exists, is worthy of worship.
As I have said before, atheism in the classical sense is limited. I’ve mentioned secular humanism many times, but I find it to be an answer to the moral and value questions that follow from leaving a religious organization. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, they all have answers to what we should find valuable and what our moral worldview should be. Non-theists should have answers to those questions as well, because it is with regards to those questions that many of us left the churches, mosques, and synagogues in the first place.
