Liberalism: a defense

A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

by 

Adam Gopnik

...a stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time 
Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought.

A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation. g'r

A vision of liberalism that doesn't concentrate too narrowly on individuals and their contracts but instead on loving relationships and living values can give us a better picture of liberal thought as it's actually evolved than the orthodox picture ...

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What Smith took from Hume’s demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.

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"For on actual examination the nihilism ascribed to liberalism just means pluralism, and its totalitarianism just means tolerance. Even the supposed loss of secure community is in itself a chimera. In my experience, no orthodox marriage on a Greek island is celebrated with as much solemnity and ceremony combined as is a gay marriage on Fire Island in New York. (Gay marriages tend to be extremely well produced.) Liberalism constitutes countless communities of common feeling. They’re just not those of a church or synagogue or mosque. From the devotees who travel to Comic-Con impersonating Chewbacca, to those who travel to Skepticon impersonating Christopher Hitchens, liberalism is full of community. They make friends and lovers along the way—very much in the spirit of medieval pilgrims headed to Canterbury. No, liberalism is dense with community; it simply makes new, nontraditional kinds of community."

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"All ideas derive from older ones, as so many Christian ideals derive from pagan philosophical ones. (Darwin got the idea of evolution, though not the evidence for it, from his grandfather.) But few ideas could be more fatuous than that secular ideals are really “just as religious” as religious ideals. The frequent insistence that everyone has a religion, or that liberalism is a religion like any other, is as absurd as saying that a belief in tolerance is the same as a belief in intolerance because both are beliefs, or that a hot bath is the same as a cold bath because both are made of water."

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"What distinguishes religions from philosophies and points of view and all the other ways people cope with the difficulties of the world—the only reason to use that specific word rather than some other—is that the religious accept the fact of supernatural intervention at some historical moment. The great faiths may have every shade of humane value, from Sufi mysticism to Islamist militancy. But one can’t really be a Christian without believing that Jesus was resurrected, or a Muslim without believing that the Qur’an was dictated by an angel, or Jewish without believing in either a creator or a chosen people. When you say, as I would, “I’m Jewish, but I don’t believe in either a creator or a chosen people,” what you are saying, precisely, is “I am not a religious Jew.”"

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"It seems difficult for people of an authoritarian cast of mind to really accept that there are other people who don’t need authority to be happy—just as people who are haunted by mortality are persuaded that everyone else must be too and that no one can live in recognition of their own impending doom and still believe in constructive work and a meaningful life. John Stuart Mill certainly underwent a spiritual crisis as a young man, which made him unhappy with the colder kinds of rationalism in which he had been instructed by his father. But he never turned toward any idea of God, a conception he regarded as fatuous and unimpressive, not to say self-evidently silly. He turned instead toward a larger and more humane idea of what reform might be, not his father’s ideal of utilitarian measurement but one that took in Mozart, music, love, and literature. He never stopped thinking that alleviating other people’s pain is the first duty of public policy. What liberals have, he thought, is better than a religion. It is a way of life."

A grown-up perspective

The Grown Up Perspective#CarlSagan #OnePlanet #SingleOrganism pic.twitter.com/GYxFcSeLHQ

— Carl Sagan Fan Page (@Saganism_) December 28, 2019

Born to walk

Forgot this was on my shelf, ordered it again this morning. Great book, from a Canadian peripatetic.

“Every day can be a pilgrimage, if the goal is a deeper sense of your small role in the revolving world.” 

The humble act of putting one foot in front of the other transcends age, geography, culture, and class, and is one of the most economical and environmentally responsible modes of transit. Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.

At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein travelled throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada to walk with people who saw the act not only as a form of transportation and recreation, but also as a path to a better world. There are no magic-bullet solutions to modern epidemics like obesity, anxiety, alienation, and climate change. But what if there is a simple way to take a step in the right direction? Combining fascinating reportage, eye-opening research, and Rubinstein’s own discoveries, Born to Walkexplores how far this ancient habit can take us, how much repair is within range, and guarantees that you’ll never again take walking for granted. g'r

The art of dying

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written an affecting rumination on life, in the shadow of his terminal cancer diagnosis. ("The Art of Dying," Dec. 23 issue).

It includes an insight into his own charitable approach to "uncongenial" art works that might be usefully applied to his personal religiosity as well.

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.

A few short paragraphs later,

“I believe in God” is a false statement for me because it is voiced by my ego, which is compulsively skeptical. But the rest of me tends otherwise. Staying on an “as if” basis with “God,” for short, hugely improves my life. I regret my lack of the church and its gift of community. My ego is too fat to squeeze through the door.

Disbelieving is toilsome. It can be a pleasure for adolescent brains with energy to spare, but hanging on to it later saps and rigidifies. After a Lutheran upbringing, I became an atheist at the onset of puberty. That wore off gradually and then, with sobriety, speedily.

I don't like this. But, out of respect for the dying and for the vaunted varieties of religious and scientific experience, I suppress my initial uncharitable impulse  and ask: What would I like about this if I liked it? And, What must the people who like this be like?

People who find disbelief "toilsome" and "adolescent" have obviously had a different experience than I. But I'm prepared to respect it, and them, if only they can evince just a little more respect for people like me.

Let's all stop talking about outgrowing either religion or irreligion, respectively, and admit that it takes all kinds. Neither attitude necessarily implicates the (dis)believer as an excessive egoist or rigid dogmatist.

In his penultimate paragraph Schjeldahl says

God creeps in. Human minds are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. The fact of our existence suggests a cosmic approval of it. (Do we behave badly? We are gifted with the capacity to think so.) We may be accidents of matter and energy, but we can’t help circling back to the sense of a meaning that is unaccountable by the application of what we know. If God is a human invention, good for us! We had to come up with something.

One of the themes of our Atheism & Philosophy course this coming semester will be the search for meaning, and the thesis that we didn't have to come up with God to come up with it.

The final paragraph I can wholeheartedly endorse:

Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.

Going to Bed

"Everything seems to be ok."

Going to Bed

by George Bilgere

I check the locks on the front door
               and the side door,
make sure the windows are closed
               and the heat dialed down.
I switch off the computer,
               turn off the living room lights.

I let in the cats.

               Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,
leaving Christ and the little animals
               in the dark.

The last thing I do
               is step out to the back yard
for a quick look at the Milky Way.

               The stars are halogen-blue.
The constellations, whose names
               I have long since forgotten,
look down anonymously,
               and the whole galaxy
is cartwheeling in silence through the night.

               Everything seems to be ok. 

WA

Mo Rocca on "delight"

Mo Rocca thinks "delight" is undervalued and underappreciated...

Here he is at the National Archives, talking about Mobituaries and other things.

Blue Marble

It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of Earth, a photo that came to be known as “The Blue Marble.” Photographs of Earth from space were relatively new.

In 1948, the astronomer Fred Hoyle said, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available — once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes plain — a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

The photograph captured on this day thirty-nine years ago was the first clear image of the Earth, because the sun was at the astronauts’ back, and so the planet appears lit up and you can distinctly see blue, white, brown, even green. It became a symbol of the environmental movement of the 1970s, and it’s the image that gets put on flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters.

The crew of Apollo 17 was about 28,000 miles away from Earth when they took the Blue Marble photo. It was the last time that astronauts, not robots, were on a lunar mission — since then, no people have gotten far enough away from Earth to take a photo like it.

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It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of the Earth, a photo that came to be known as "The Blue Marble." Photographs of the Earth from space were relatively new at this time.

On Christmas Eve of 1968, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, orbiting the moon, took a photo with the gray, craggy surface of the moon in the foreground and the bright blue Earth coming up behind, only half of it visible. That photo was called "Earthrise," and it really shook people up because it made the Earth look so fragile, and because the photo was taken by actual people, not just a satellite.

And on this day in 1972, the crew of Apollo 17 took another photograph, not only one of the most famous images of the Earth but one of the most widely distributed photos ever taken. It's known as "The Blue Marble" because that's how the Earth looked to the astronauts. It was the first clear photo of the Earth, because the sun was at the astronauts' back, and so the planet appears lit up and you can distinctly see blue, white, brown, even green. It became a symbol of the environmental movement of the 1970s, and it's the image that gets put on flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters.

The crew of Apollo 17 was about 28,000 miles away from Earth when they took the Blue Marble photo. It was the last time that astronauts, not robots, were on a lunar mission — since then, no people have gotten far enough away from the Earth to take a photo like it.

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It's an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in history. Because it's in the public domain it has been used for everything from car commercials to the Earth Day flag, printed on T-shirts, postage stamps, billboards, book covers, mouse pads -- most any surface you can print on. It even has its own Facebook page. In the NASA archive its formal designation is AS17-148-22727 but it's commonly known as The Blue Marble Shot, and forty years later we still aren't sure who actually took it... (Atlantic, continues)