A new signature

January seems like a good time to try out a new email signature. Nothing wrong with the old ones, they're just... old.

This worked especially well last month:

"Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation." -William James

And this was a good signature for all seasons:

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -Douglas Adams

But I think I'll begin the new year with this, wordy though it is:

"It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever... Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?" -Richard Dawkins

A good question

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? -"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

This year's edge.org annual question invites speculation on the murky, over-the-technological-rainbow future. Lots of interesting responses...

Happy New Year

Old Nietzsche was right about one thing - the best ideas arise during walks. This year I resolve to keep on walking, and feeding my passion for perambulation. One delightful source of nourishment: Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (Riverhead Bks 2008).

More on this soon.

Be Good for Heaven's Sake?

Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a recent Pew study, Charles Blow reports, said that "atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go." They thought "you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person," no specific faith-based dogmas required.

Wow. I'm guessing respondents from my region were not proportionately represented in this survey, but still... I won't kick and scream, as long as the door to heaven opens both ways. I'd love to go and investigate Mark Twain's observation that hell must be lots more fun.

Is this a testament to the tolerant pluralism of average believing Americans? Or just another way of misrepresenting the moral life and making goodness instrumental to the gain of eternal reward? No. Be good for goodness' sake.

Merry Christmas

I just listened to an annoying radio interview with Jose Feliciano, who was asked if he worried that anyone in the world might ever tire of hearing "Feliz Navidad." The gist of his reply: only the atheists are likely to tire of this tune and its simple message ("I want to wish you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart" etc. etc. ad infinitum) - and atheists don't like anything anyway.

Well, Jose, we like plenty - thank you very much. And I do want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I don't believe a virgin ever birthed a savior, but I'm happy to celebrate the birth of anyone who brought or brings tidings of peace, love, and understanding. I'm sure Jose is not alone in thinking that atheists are only nattering nabobs of negativism. That's a misconception, and I'll be doing my best to correct it when I teach a course next Fall I'm tentatively calling "Atheism: Old and New." My mission: make it clear to students that renouncing belief in God is not tantamout to renouncing life and spirit and meaning and hope.

This is my first post in this forum since July - and that was itself a cameo appearance. I'll probably blog again, but never again (I think) on a self-imposed schedule. I have a cartoon on my office wall: "Thank goodness you're here," says the desk-bound Everyman to Mr. Death, "I never get anything done without a deadline."

In fact, deadlines per se don't motivate me, except negatively: I resist and defy and recoil. But perhaps thinking about death, in some strange way, does inspire. My last post concerned the very public death of Randy Pausch. What was much on my mind then, but unacknowledged, was my Dad's leukemia-induced decline. He passed in September, after nearly eight decades of a salutary life. That loss feels heavier today than it has most days since.

I've not consoled myself at all with thoughts of eternity or reunion in heaven, and cannot. In one of our last significant conversations, I shared with Dad an exchange between William James and his own fatally-ill father, in 1882:

"As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I can't say anything..."

Well, I can say of such a reunion that I don't expect it and - if faith is a condition - don't deserve it. But my disbelief is not simply a negation, it is an affirmation of the life he lived on Earth, and the example he set for those of us who attended and will follow. It is a commitment to pass the torch he handed me and my siblings to my own children, to the best of my ability. I'm not looking for a transcendental bailout. I don't think he was either.

Randy Pausch

Professor Randy Pausch, whose "last lecture" and high-profile struggle with pancreatic cancer won wide admiration and sympathy, died yesterday.

I passed my copy of Randy’s book along to my Dad, recently diagnosed with leukemia. He was moved and inspired by it, as was I. We agreed that for a young man with small children to muster such a courageous response to a terminal diagnosis - stoical but also joyous and celebratory - is truly heroic. I’m so grateful that Randy was willing to share his story and his example with the world.

Still here...

...and still trying to decide whether to blog or not to blog, after a five month hiatus. Life has been eventful and full without it, can't say I've missed this forum much. In fact, I probably wouldn't be posting at all if I (1) were teaching summer school and (2) didn't have projects and deadlines to procrastinate about.

But for the record, I am still living and breathing and attempting, sporadically, to think. Maybe I'll yet decide to share some of the results with the wide, distracted world.

Changing minds

Edge.org begins every year by posting a question and a diverse array of responses. This year the big question is: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.When God changes your mind, that's faith.When facts change your mind, that's science. Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html

Lots of fascinating and provocative responses have already been submitted. Willingness to change - not for the sake of change alone, but for solid reasons - is a huge step forward for our species. I'm for it. Happy New Year!

"Pulling the Plug" (again)

Nice piece recently in Orion by Robert Michael Pyle -http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/466

He pulled his own plug, more or less. He still goes online a couple times a week, but not at home:

I know I am missing out on some wonderful exchanges and capabilities. But I already weep over all the indoor hours when I could actually be out, combing the moss for waterbears or contemplating the profound mystery of where people get the time to read blogs, for gods’ sakes—is it at the complete expense of books?

When we read the blogs, how much do we misread? And how much do we misrepresent ourselves when we write them? I recently had an unpleasant exchange with a friend in reaction to one of his blog posts, in part because the medium does not lend itself to nuance and in part because, it seemed to me, my friend was engaged in a sort of performance - not a genuine and sincere communication. He was busy constructing a persona, not engaging in a real conversation. It pissed me off, but in an instructive way. I blog, therefore I bloviate. We must all take care not to damage human relationships in the course of framing ourselves as clever and sophisticated cultural observers - an unintended but not unforeseeable consequence of this form of discourse. The electronic-human interface does not necessarily have to make us shallow persons. Blogging doesn't have to be superficial. But it sure can be.

Bill McKibben was prophetic about this, as about so much else. Our vaunted Information Age truly is an "Age of Missing Information." But rather than pull the plug in a literal way, I'm going to continue tasking myself each day to pull away from the keyboard and the email and the blogs in responsible moderation. Our evolutionary health and day-to-day sanity and civility really depend on our learning to do this.

Gratitude

Thanksgiving is one of my two favorite holidays, the other being Independence Day.

Richard Ford's wonderful novel The Lay of the Land (Knopf, '06) expresses much of my feeling about this day, and about the hard-won "acceptance" that comes with loving life while still deploring loss. I love and accept a lot, but not everything: so, on some accounts, I thus lack the deepest form of gratitude and spirituality. But I agree with Ford: "a practical acceptance of what's what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it..."

Another of my favorite sources on this topic is the philosopher Loyal Rue, who has written:

By the grace of these improbable [cosmic] events we inherit the opportunity of a lifetime. Even if we cannot imagine some One to give thanks to, we are nonetheless rendered thankful by the bountiful conditions of our existence. And in the measure of our gratitude we acquire a sense of obligation. The more we learn about the Epic of Evolution the more we are motivated to repay the generosity of the past by seeding hope for the future. http://www.earthlight.org/personal26.html

In other words: pay it forward.