Mind cure

"Not to put too glib a gloss on it: there is no denying that the rampant “spread of the movement” was “due to practical fruits,” as William James remarks affably in his 1902 lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Perhaps it did not cure tuberculosis, but what James called “the religion of healthy-mindedness” could not have amassed such a sizable following if it did not help people cope with their daily frustrations. Admittedly, it was helpful only to those already disposed to pathological optimism: James joked that mind cure produced such a militantly cheerful attitude that “complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households.”

But different temperaments require different medicines, and “mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness.” As for the rest of us, those burdened with what James terms a “sick soul,” darker stratagems (prime among them more traditional species of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism) are available. Perhaps because my soul is sick, I cannot share James’s sanguinity about mind cure.

The most charitable thing I can say is that, from a certain point of view, its popularity is understandable. It at least purported to relieve—which meant it at least took seriously—many of the symptoms for which the establishment was equipped to offer nothing but condolences. As the historian Donald Meyer notes in his witty study, The Positive Thinkers, “Statistics on the incidence of diffuse dissatisfactions, unfixed discontent, vague depletion and free-floating unhappiness do not exist.”

We cannot know whether “nervousness” and “neurasthenia” are uniquely modern ailments, but we can and do know that they hardened into acknowledged conditions at the turn of the century. Medieval peasants may have been (indeed, almost certainly were) anxious and unfulfilled in their own way, but it was not until the late 1800s that malcontents understood their complaints as maladies in want of remedy..."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess" by Becca Rothfeld: https://a.co/d9iUwJ4

I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke

"I like to think that I'm always doing American philosophy, because I am trying to cultivate an understanding of philosophy that finds it manifested in all sorts of activities, and because I try to approach life as Deweyan inquiry."

Lisa Heldke is Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College where she also directs the annual Nobel Conference. She is the author of Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (2003) co-author of Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016) with Ray Boisvert, and the co-editor of several anthologies, including Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992), Oppression, Privilege and Resistance: Theoretical Readings on Racism, Sexism and Heterosexism (2003), & The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (2006). She works in philosophy of food, American philosophy, and feminist philosophy. In 2022 she was awarded the John Dewey Society Award for Outstanding Achievement.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

It's August, and I am (yet again) revising the syllabus for my course in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies written by people living in the geographic boundaries of what is now the United States. That awkward, wordy description is intentional; each time I set out to write a syllabus for this course—the course that transformed me as a student, the course then called "American Philosophy" in the catalog—I confront the fact that I don't know what American philosophy means or should mean. I've changed the name of that very same course (I teach at my alma mater–it's literally the same course, at least on some solutions to the Ship of Theseus paradox) to "Philosophy Looks at the U.S." I advertise it as a course in which we explore how philosophers within this geographic area have reflected on some of the moments and movements from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have defined the country: settler colonialism, enslavement, immigration, urbanization, rural life...

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-lisa-heldke/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHNnTBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdc0524qLx4P5_E7IADdg0GClgc0wQrcWridNJjCW76mYN6Vkrk3QIL7bw_aem_jiMsj9KjEPuWKt1rNhvrCQ

crusade against ignorance

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: "No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of "kings, nobles and priests"], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." HCR

Words matter

In low moments, I sincerely doubt that anyone ever changes their mind, and I especially doubt that anyone ever changes their mind in response to an op-ed. But our planet, our home, is in mortal danger, and words are all I've got. So I'm taking my very best shot here.

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/opinion/trump-harris-election-climate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XU4.g3Yl.LHkfOgVHkiRB&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Admirable sense sans transcendence

"My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have 'an ambition of transcendence.'"
— Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

Adams’s benediction

"May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof" —John Adams

Letter to Abigail Adams, 2 November 1800

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L18001102ja

Citizen’s guide to defending democracy

"…If the results come down to one or two states, they could experience protests or even riots, threats to election officials, and other attempts to change the results.

This prospect can feel overwhelming: Many people are not just upset about the possibility of a lost or stolen election, but oppressed by a sensation of helplessness. This feeling—I can't do anything; my actions don't matter—is precisely the feeling that autocratic movements seek to instill in citizens, as Peter Pomerantsev and I explain in our recent podcast, Autocracy in America. But you can always do something. If you need advice about what that might be, here is an updated citizen's guide to defending democracy..."

Anne Applebaum
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/citizens-guide-defending-2024-election/680254/

In dog we trust

"Fred was an unbeliever. He worshiped no personal God, no Supreme Being. He certainly did not worship me. If he had suddenly taken to worshiping me, I think I would have felt as queer as God must have felt the other day when a minister in California, pronouncing the invocation for a meeting of Democrats, said, "We believe Adlai Stevenson to be Thy choice for President of the United States. Amen."

I respected this quirk in Fred, this inability to conform to conventional canine standards of religious feeling. And in the miniature democracy that was, and is, our household he lived undisturbed and at peace with his conscience.

I hope my country will never become an uncomfortable place for the unbeliever, as it could easily become if prayer was made one of the requirements of the accredited citizen. My wife, a spiritual but not a prayerful woman, read Mr. Eisenhower's call to prayer in the Tribune and said something I shall never forget. "Maybe it's all right," she said. "But for the first time in my life I'm beginning to feel like an outsider in my own land."

Democracy is itself a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have. And so when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog steal in from sea, I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby."

— Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
https://a.co/6BGuL0j

Words matter

Blood poison, vermin, the 'enemy within': The language of the the 1930s has not been used successfully in modern American politics. But maybe that's because no one, before now, has tried.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-authoritarian-rhetoric-hitler-mussolini/680296/?gift=hVZeG3M9DnxL4CekrWGK3_BAdwxgTnhDQOES_Ka50h0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Vox populi

  I early-voted at Hillwood High School this morning.

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
― Winston S. Churchill

When I early-voted in 2020 I posted these reflections, which still seem all too relevant:

Still in the game

We finish Falter today in Environmental Ethics. It would be nice to think we’re all about to finish faltering, as a democratic nation under siege of pandemic, political chaos, and climate denial/indifference. For a brief while yesterday morning, queuing to vote in the pleasant middle Tennessee sunshine outside the Bellevue branch of the Metro Public Library, I believed. 

The simple act of casting a ballot feels constructive and empowering, the very opposite of faltering. It feels like moving forward. The feeling would linger if only we could lose the electoral college that effectively denies some of us proportionate representation. Ranked-choice voting in the primaries would be good too. 

But never mind, for now. Yesterday was all about the invigorating sense of democratic dignity that free people expressing their will in free and fair elections still, for now, get to enjoy in this country. Conjuring Chris Stevens’ invocation of Einstein (vs. Randian selfishness) from the memory vault yesterday I’ve also recalled his paean to democracy in little (fictional) Cicely, Alaska. “You see, the act of voting is in itself the defining moment.”

My friends, today when I look out over Cicely, I see not a town, but a nation’s history written in miniature…we exterminated untold indigenous cultures and enslaved generations of Africans. We basically stained our star-spangled banner with a host of sins that can never be washed clean. But today, we’re here to celebrate the glorious aspects of our past. A tribute to a nation of free people, the country that Whitman exalted. (reading) “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives and legislators, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.” I’ve never been so proud to be a Cicelian. I must go out now and fill my lungs with the deep clean air of democracy. Northern Exposure Season 3, Episode 15-“Democracy in America” 

A lung-full of freedom is bracing. Breathe deep. Vote. Resist democracy’s destabilizers and dismantlers while you can. The great game of self-governance has never in my lifetime felt so imperiled, or more worth fighting for.

But as Bill McKibben acknowledges in Falter, resistance comes at a cost. “I know so many people who have given over the prime of their lives to this fight.” But he also knows “many people who’ve found their lives in this work, in burgeoning movements that are full of love and friendship.” The tired cliche about finding meaning and purpose in causes larger than oneself is not wrong, the vivifying and ennobling benefits of personal and shared commitment are real. Resistance may be frustrating and may finally fail, but it’s not futile. Remember Grantland Rice, a game well-played is its own reward. You don’t have to fly the “W” to be a winner at life. 

Still, though, to lose democracy, humanity, and Gaia to indifference and inattention would be tragic and stupid. Resisting the apathy and amused-to-death distraction that permit the plutocrats to plunder the planet for personal profit, is in that light not radical or subversive. You might even call it conservatism, if that word weren’t already so tainted, to want and work for “a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.” Solidarity simply means the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Ask the Scandinavians, who consistently top the World Happiness Report. In 2018 the USA was #18 on that list. If we say we believe in humanity that should embarrass us... (Up@dawn Oct '20, continues)

Wilmington

In 1898, white supremacists waged a deadly coup to overthrow Wilmington, North Carolina's democratically elected, multi-racial government.

AMERICAN COUP: WILMINGTON 1898 premieres November 12 at 9/8c on @PBS → https://to.pbs.org/3Y5AfkK AmericanCoupPBS

Of course it was

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…

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-82c?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

L of C “Chronicling America” database

It's National Newspaper Week! 📰 The Library's "Chronicling America" database contains 21 million+ pages of historic newspapers. Papers through 1963 are digitized, so the most impactful news stories from the early 20th century & beyond can be searched for & read about online. 🧵

https://www.threads.net/@librarycongress/post/DA1aXghPU81?xmt=AQGz3G-twrOZsVE0qxqFQ-0l8hDmXgPPaDOqkOs0VI89hA

Freedom & AUTOCRACY IN AMERICA

The fifth and final episode of AUTOCRACY IN AMERICA has dropped. The subject: Freedom, a word that in American history has sometimes meant freedom for some people and the repression of others.

Apple podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autocracy-in-america/id1763234285
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0ujIGO5bvCO6NkevvgsWTL
The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/10/the-danger-of-politicizing-freedom/680117/

Mary Jane Jacob

 “One of the things I love about Dewey’s thinking is the courage he gives us to seize our life and make it. This element of aliveness, the energetic vitality that comes with making, is grounded in experience, and is validated by Dewey.”

Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Chair of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is the author of Dewey for Artists (2018) and the co-editor of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (2022) for her show at Tate Modern in London, as well as Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (2012), Learning Mind: Experience Into Art (2009), and Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004), among other books and exhibition catalogues. She was formerly chief curator at the Museums of Contemporary Art in both Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at SAIC. She has curated numerous exhibitions and artists’ site-specific and socially engaged projects.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

Dewey—whose understanding of human nature and the personal challenge each of us must seize to craft a life (which has everything to do with forging a democracy)—could not be more important right now. Democracy, which Dewey realized we must build iteratively with each generation, is lost on those who seek to be free from this invested task of making our democracy, who think freedom is found in what democracy does for them. Today, as I write, Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate. In this moment, to embody Deweyan democracy we must consider not just what American philosophy can mean but also how it can be put into action.

How did you become an American philosopher?

How? In a most circuitous route. From 1999-2004, I undertook with Jacquelynn Baas an experiential research program called “Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness.” I got into this project not because of any Eastern spiritual expertise, but because I’d curated some lived-practice art projects that, moving out of the museum, sought to test the possible relationships between artists, art, and audiences. One result was the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004). At the end Jacquelynn said, “maybe we should have looked at Dewey’s Art As Experience.” Then I did just that—for the next ten years—both through theory (reading Dewey in every which way, lecturing, and writing) and through practice (curating social practice with artists and audiences).

How would you describe your current research?

This past summer I have been surveying the books, conference workbooks, foundation reports, exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and theoretical treatises that I have amassed over the past 25 years. They now seem to chart the dynamic and contentious terrain of what we call social practice art. The keywords that emerge from this movement are community, education, and democracy.

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

One of the things I love about Dewey’s thinking is the courage he gives us to seize our life and make it. This element of aliveness, the energetic vitality that comes with making, is grounded in experience, and is validated by Dewey.

Five years ago, my husband (an historian and museum director, Russell Lewis) died after a brief bout with cancer. Everyone who experiences loss (and Dewey had his share), knows that in small or big ways you have to remake your life. For me, I must cook, every day, handle the material ingredients that are more than sustenance, compose and present them, even if just for me, and then share these makings with others as often as I can. At heart and in practice, I am a curator.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

The hardest question. I’ll say Peter Korn’s Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman. I’ll admit in part this is because this book is well designed; it feels good to hold. (When working on my Dewey book, I always tried to obtain early editions of his works; they were created in such a different way from now.) While Korn does not speak of Dewey, he follows a thread that starts with Dewey’s mechanic in Art As Experience, springs forward to Robert M. Pirsig’s brilliant Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: A Inquiry into Values, and on to David A. Granger’s insightful John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living. These books bring us back to what matters; they are centering. Making is a meditation.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-mary-jane-jacob/

Good question

The publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" on this day in 1962 put the world on alert to the dangers of overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides, proving a key motivator in the nationwide ban of DDT, a popular but hazardous insecticide.

Decades later, what is the impact of Carson's work?
https://to.pbs.org/3xTLPmW

Peace Corps

On this day in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating the Peace Corps, an agency aimed at fostering mutual understanding between Americans and people around the world.

Conceived as a Cold War initiative, the agency would outlast its original context, providing help to those in need globally and offering an opportunity to improve mutual understanding between Americans and those in other countries.

https://bit.ly/2HbaABJ

George

On this day in 1796, President George Washington's farewell address was printed in the Daily American Advertiser as an open letter to American citizens. The most famous of all his "speeches," it was never actually spoken; a week after its publication in this Philadelphia newspaper, it was reprinted in papers all over the country.

The address was a collaborative effort that took Washington months to finalize, incorporating the notes that James Madison had prepared four years prior when Washington intended to retire after his first term, as well as numerous edits from Alexander Hamilton and a critique from John Jay. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were accustomed to writing collectively; together they had published the Federalist Papers, 85 newspaper articles published throughout the 13 states to introduce and explain their proposal for a Constitution.

Now only eight years old, the Constitution was in danger, Washington feared, of falling prey to the whims of popular sentiment. In 6,086 words, his address seeks to encourage the nation to respect and maintain the Constitution, warning that a party system — not yet the governmental standard operating procedure — would reduce the nation to infighting. He urged Americans to relinquish their personal or geographical interests for the good of the national interest, warning that "designing men" would try to distract them from their larger common views by highlighting their smaller, local differences. "You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection," he wrote.

Washington also feared interference by foreign governments…

https://thewritersalmanac.substack.com/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-433?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&r=35ogp

The Misfit Wisdom of Harry, Barry and Larry

"No literary genre has been so closely tied to a musical one as has Rough South to Americana."

Dwight Garner

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/books/review/harry-crews-barry-hannah-larry-brown.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Reality Check: How divided is America, really?

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/reality-check-how-divided-is-america-really/

Jane Addams

The first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois.

https://to.pbs.org/4dRUM3c

Leaving Walden

On this day in 1847, Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) left Walden Pond and moved back to his father's house in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau had lived in the hut for two years, leading a simple life of gardening and contemplation, subsisting on a daily budget of 27-1/2 cents. When he moved back to Concord, he took with him the first draft of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, strung together from 10 years of journal entries. WA

"...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically...

""""""

...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion...

"""""" 

...I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..." 

LoA pics

 

Little Rock

When Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered state National Guard troops to surround Little Rock's Central High School on September 4, 1957, blocking nine Black students from enrolling, the reverberations were worldwide.

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C_f0KXytpTL/?xmt=AQGz7RwOG9gk3K7yfiXHvyfniLNeBtLvXwnV5iu9e8Rt4g

Our intellectual declaration of independence

It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson(books by this author) delivered a speech entitled "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard University.

Emerson wasn't especially well known at the time. He was actually filling in for Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who had backed out of the speaking engagement at the last minute.

The speech was the first time he explained his transcendentalist philosophy in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.

He said: "Life is our dictionary ... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it ... Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."

The speech was published that same year. It made Emerson famous, and it brought the ideas of transcendentalism to young men like Henry David Thoreau. Oliver Wendell Holmes later praised Emerson's "The American Scholar" as the "intellectual Declaration of Independence." WA

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-a41?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

March on DC

On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to protest racial inequality.

Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others led the crowd in song before speeches by John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

📸: Marchers with signs at the March on Washington, 1963 (Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress)

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C_NxgjDIO5K/?xmt=AQGzRKn1qDmy0yvoDw0bXMdBrGA-aaGp10eZ0uh3NcRnAg

The roots of Americana: Welch and Rawlings

Opening Day feeling: “this one thing”

What Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Took from the Tornado

"…d.r.: And you stand up onstage in front of all these people and play. It's such an honor to have all of your energy focussed on this one thing that you care about so much. And to know that all the work you've done in the past—all the thinking about what the next line's going to be, or what the next story you're going to tell is, or what the next note you're gonna play is, or what you played last night that really was fun and you need to remember how to do that again because people enjoyed it so much and you enjoyed it, that you have this North Star. It's unreal.

g.w.: It's so heartening that, with everything that's going on in everybody's lives and in the world, people still feel that impulse. They still want to go and sit in a dark room and listen to people sing."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings-took-from-the-tornado

Suffrage

On August 18, 1920, the fight to ratify the 19th Amendment came down to one senator from Tennessee and a letter from his mother.

When it was finally settled, women in the United States had secured the right to vote.
https://to.pbs.org/3M6NfB4

A Telling of the Scopes Monkey Trial Where Evolution Is Not the Point

In "Keeping the Faith," Brenda Wineapple finds an ongoing battle over the soul of America in a century-old trial.

...[Darrow] was a man in the mold of Robert Ingersoll, a.k.a. the Great Agnostic, the freethinker who tore through the lecture halls of the 19th century smashing all the idols of Christian America. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, the women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and a very long list of philosophers, writers, education reformers and politicians were of the same, heretical stripe.

These were Darrow's people — his friends, his admirers, his clients, his forebears, his fellow dreamers — and some of them get cameos in this book. They saw themselves, rightly, as part of a movement that, extending back to the Republic's enlightened founders, defied the orthodoxies of the time to keep America true to its democratic promise. They played a critical, underappreciated role in navigating the economic and social conflicts that roiled the Progressive Era.

It all came to a head once again in the crucible of a Tennessee summer, when Darrow and Bryan faced off. At stake was the very idea of self-government. One man held that the safety of the nation demanded the enforcement of a common creed revealed from on high. The other maintained that the foundation of human freedom rests not on the uniformity of belief but on the contest of ideas among an educated public at the bar of reason.

Under Darrow's ruthless cross-examination, Bryan's ignorance even of the Bible (never mind Darwin) was exposed. Scopes was found guilty (no surprise there), but the idea of government of, by and for the people lived another day.

Wineapple prefers not to draw as many explicit connections with the American past and future as this reviewer would have liked. She is also not nearly as judgmental. But I will get over it. "Keeping the Faith" is history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care. And if you have been awake for the past 16 years or so, you won't miss the point. The struggles of yesteryear between reason and ignorance do not merely illuminate those of the present. They are the same struggle. This is a story from a past that isn't even past.

________________________________

KEEPING THE FAITH: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation | By Brenda Wineapple | Random House | 509 pp. | $38

nyt

Commencement summer '24

 700+ newly-credentialed grads this morning at Murphy Center, always a milestone to celebrate. I do wonder how many of them were truly "liberally" educated, in the best sense of the term (the sense we try to support in the MALA program). 

 

 

 But it's never too late to learn and grow, as most of you know; so good luck to the class of '24 and to all who follow.

(And btw, Jada, your poster on the wall looks great.)

Walden

On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods (books by this author). His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw a "tremble of great expectation" in Thoreau just before publication day. Thoreau's previous book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), sold fewer than 300 copies. On the day he got his 706 unsold copies back from the publisher, he wrote in his diary: "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ..." Walden didn't do much better. It took five years to sell off the first edition of 2,000 copies, and Thoreau did not live to see a second edition. He managed to arrange a nationwide lecture tour, but only one city made an offer, and so Thoreau kept his lectures to the Concord area. Since then, millions of copies of Walden have been sold. WA

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-august-0fb?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Diversity in Philosophy Presentation

    Hi everyone, this is my diversity in Philosophy. I am so sorry I could not present in class. It has been an interesting two weeks for me to say the least, but here it is! I hope you enjoyed reading my PowerPoint posted above. I decided to do an overview presentation on what diversity looks like in North American philosophy (sorry I tried to stay within American culture, but had to add a little piece of Canada in there). I began by introducing what diversity looks like in the university philosophy departments, and suggested a possible reason why there are such small amounts of minorities in the program. Though, my main focus for this presentation are the three philosophers mentioned. In my research, these philosophers stuck out to me, based on their theories, ideas, and individual stories. Each philosopher comes from a different background. Cornel West is an African American philosopher, Maria Lugones is a lesbian/Latin American philosopher, and Dale Turner is an Indigenous Canadian philosopher. The key aspect of these philosophers is that they are impactful in todays society. They have touched on and have worked to change diversity issues in the North American society. Also, I believe they are working to change the view of philosophy in the younger audience, which we talked about in text and in class. This is just a little tidbit of diversity in philosophy, as well as, where philosophy could be headed in North America. 

    I would love to hear what you guys think about this topic. Has anyone heard about these three philosophers before? Do you know of others that fit the same description? Also, speaking on diversity topics has become more popular as I grew up, where do you think this is headed? Do you think philosophy in America will change because of this in the coming years? If yes, what will these changes look like? 

Thank you so much for reading!

Jada on diversity in philosophy

Jada's getting her report draft ready, and will be giving us some discussion questions to consider and respond to. Meanwhile, here's a link to it, if anyone would care to go ahead and offer comments.

 Diversity in philosophy.pptx

Questions AUG 6

 Last class already! 

I'm hitting the road for my annual August meetup with far-flung friends and won't have as much time this week to think up questions. Let's crowd-source them. UPDATE: I'm back, had a great time (see below). Thanks for your questions, crowd. 🙏

Anderson, ch12-15; McDermott, ch13-14; Romano Parts 5-6. REPORT: Hailey, Isocrates (Romano pt 5); Jada, ---

1. Had you ever even heard of Isocrates? Why do you think most of us haven't? Do you prefer him to his more famous almost-namesake? 
2. COMMENT?: "In the United States, we don't have to teach people how to philosophize because the country's immense diversity forces them to it. And if, in America, we've come to recognize that truth comes from consensus... Isocrates, not Socrates, is our man." 560
3. Are you persuaded by Romano that President Obama was a pragmatist (in the American philosophical sense)? Is it likely that we'll have a philosophically-inclined president in the future? 
4. Looking back over our whirlwind mini-'mester, how would you summarize what you've learned about the intersection of American philosophy and American culture? Are you hopeful and optimistic for the future prospects of democracy in America, or otherwise? Or is it hard to think beyond November?
5. More coming soon... Please help me out, everybody post a couple of discussion questions.
6. I'm back... Do you agree with Emerson (and Anderson, and James) that "language...routinely and inevitably falls short of experience" and that, therefore, there's a place for the poetic in philosophy? 196
7. Anderson says John Dewey, despite his strong advocacy of democracy, "displays deep misgivings about American culture" and "recognizes the need...to be prepared for the failures of democracy in a precarious world" (215). Do you have such misgivings? Are you prepared? Do you think we can rebound from our failures?
   
8. What do you think it means to say that "community must cross time as well as space"? 232 (HINT: see Dewey's gravestone epitaph)
9. Are you an Either/Or or a Both/And thinker? 243-4
10. Do you agree with McDermott that "boredom and ennui are signs of a living death"? 198
11. Is indoor and night-time baseball a mistake? 205
12. Have cities become hostile to the "human scale" and absent a suitable "personscape"? 207
13. COMMENT?: "Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." 217
14. COMMENT?: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his/her own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools... destroys our democracy." 221
15. COMMENT?: "Isolation from the flow of experience is a fate worse than death..." 222

Following up Erica's report...

Here's a virtual tour of Jane Addams's Hull House

==

Following up last week's discussion of "cyberphilosophy"...

Here’s Why ‘The Matrix’ Is More Relevant Than Ever
One scene reflects the themes — A.I., fake news, transgender lives and Gen X — that make the film a classic.

Neo, the hero of “The Matrix,” is sure he lives in 1999. He has a green-hued cathode-ray-tube computer screen and a dot-matrix printer. His city has working phone booths.

But he’s wrong: He lives in the future (2199, to be exact). Neo’s world is a simulation — a fake-out version of the late 20th century, created by 21st-century artificial intelligences to enslave humanity.

When we first saw Neo, though, it really was 1999. The idea of A.I. feeding on human brains and bodies seemed like a thought experiment. But the movie’s warnings about A.I. — and everything else — have sharpened over time, which explains why it’s been harnessed by all kinds of people in the years since: philosophers, pastors, techno-boosters and techno-doomers, the alt-right. Judged solely on cultural relevance, “The Matrix” might be the most consequential release of 1999... nyt

Went for a walk in Durham by Phil Oliver

and found some classic Americana

Read on Substack

Shall we?

It was on this day in 1965 that Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that ended the long era of voter discrimination in many Southern states. Johnson had been delaying legislation on voting rights, because he thought it was too soon for it to succeed. But after a group of civil rights marchers were attacked in Selma, Alabama, he gave a speech on TV, in which he said: "I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote ... it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

That was the first time the president of the United States had ever used the phrase, "We shall overcome." Martin Luther King Jr. was watching the address on TV that night, and he later said that when he heard Lyndon Johnson say the words "we shall overcome," he burst into tears. The president signed the legislation a few months later, on this day in 1965.

And it was on this day in 1945 that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. It was the first time that a nuclear weapon was ever used in warfare, and only the second time that a nuclear weapon had ever been exploded. It was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15 in the morning. It exploded 1,900 feet above the ground. Capt Robert Lewis watched the explosion from his cockpit and wrote in his journal, "My God, what have we done?"

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-tuesday-afd?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Real dangers (and wins)

"Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win."
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity Thr

Also William James's view:

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem..." --The Dilemma of Determinism, 1895

 

Coming to America… in an alternate universe (as portrayed by Virginia textbooks in the ‘50s)

https://www.threads.net/@thehumanityarchive/post/C-TVodCINyf/?xmt=AQGzgshTmoEtEFQ4RTpYuGfPG1iTUagPPuf2zCntDXHE4g

Ben’s day

Not quite the way Michael Douglas portrayed him.

https://www.threads.net/@michaelwarburton1/post/C-UlglGIZmJ/?xmt=AQGzQuxRunUfQm9f6ZXB9tTRUJo-HxhxlkayK1kPQvmxvQ

jazz is jazz

"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz."

Louis Armstrong, the legendary trumpeter and jazz vocalist, was born on August 4, 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

In a career that spanned decades and brought jazz music to the fore of American culture, Armstrong's on-stage companions ranged from Bing Crosby to Ella Fitzgerald to Barbara Streisand.

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C-P82PDCz5s/?xmt=AQGzfnSgTgzWBBEWNdyGnpag1VsnHGnrcQ7r27Q-TPqUug

Appodlachia

We try to highlight better books to learn about Appalachia than Hillbilly Elegy, so each day until the election we're going to share a different one you should read instead.

Day 1: Another Appalachia by @avashia

https://www.threads.net/@appodlachia/post/C9hy3CtRD1B/?xmt=AQGzCeQ608VWcV6ZssLIk5Jhfa6Cd90xxiJr85BoxLSYPw

Went for a walk Sunday morning in Durham,

 found some classic Americana:

 

 

If you know baseball, and baseball cinema, you'll recognize the images of the original Durham Bulls ballpark which the city has preserved as an urban park. And maybe you'll recall the scene in the film "Bull Durham" when the coach berates his players for being "Lollygaggers"... which is why my old grad school pals and I have started to call our annual meetup at a designated minor league baseball venue a Lollypalooza, and ourselves a

 

We started the annual August meetup in 2017, converging on Nashville from various far-flung places in the southeast U.S. (just two of us reside in middle TN). In subsequent years (missing only the first pandemic summer of '20) we've been to Chattanooga, Asheville, Huntsville, Lexington, Knoxville (Kodak TN), and now Durham. 

For next year we're talking about Greenville SC, home of one of this year's new Lollygaggers. And the year after, since we've picked now up a Minnesotan (seems like that's suddenly a trend, since today is Tim Walz's veep candidacy debut), we may have to think about getting on a plane to St. Paul. After that, Fred, Durango?

Everyone should make a point of keeping up and meeting up with old friends through the decades. It really is like stepping back in time, for a weekend. It's a good and happiness-inducing thing to do.

And thanks to Younger Daughter for taking good care of the pooches in my absence. Maybe she needs a tee-shirt that says 

My dad went to a ballgame and all I got was:

Philosopher News Network: Doping Scandal - Existential Comics

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/562

William James did indeed experiment with mind-altering substances (like nitrous oxide)..."On Some Hegelisms"

NYTimes: What Can a City Do When Neo-Nazis Start Marching Down Its Streets?

…On Saturday, a group of Black Nashville residents stood downtown in support of the young children who had faced racist vitriol from the group and to voice frustration with what they felt was an uneven treatment by the police. Amplified by a megaphone, their chants reverberated over passers-by on their way to a Bitcoin conference, tourists headed to the Country Music Hall of Fame and bachelorette parties wheeling by.

Robert C. Sherrill, a business leader and youth advocate who lives in North Nashville, took the bullhorn and asked, "What are we doing, America?"