Lachs Lyceum: Critics for Hire

A student who lives a literal stone's throw from the recent tornado's path of destruction brought pictures today. They were stunning and sobering. The world of humanly-engendered upheaval seems to pale by comparison.

But that's where we live most of the time, and so it was heartening to be on the receiving end of a marvelous pep-talk from the incomparable John Lachs, at the first of our department's annual Lyceum lectures. Lachs reminded us:

Teaching the young involves activities that pull in different directions: the culture’s practices and values must be handed on, but they must also be criticized and suitably revised. In doing the former, teachers act as servants of the past, giving a favorable account of the fruits of long experience. In doing the latter, they labor for the future, presenting ideas for how our practices can be improved. The first activity is centered on sketching the geography of what exists and explaining the rules governing it; the second is about the ways the possible can bring improvement to the actual. The first without the second yields stagnation, the second without the first creates chaos. When properly related, the two preserve what is of value from the past even as they encourage active dreaming about a better future.

We are transmitters of what John Dewey called "the inherited resources of the race," but we're also instigators and subversives (or, less provocatively but no less crucially, ameliorators). That's in our job description:

Tenure in universities and colleges was instituted largely to protect faculty members in their vital activity of offering unpopular possibilities to their students, to administrators and to the public at large. Some may think that tenure confers on faculty members a right to speak and on institutions a collateral obligation not to fire them for the views they hold as professionals. This, however, is only a part of the story. The right conferred carries with it a duty: faculty members are not only permitted to speak their minds without retaliation, they must do so. By extending tenure, an institution of higher education hires critics and pledges to pay them for the trouble they give. Those who do not present possibilities constituting at least tacit criticisms of the status quo fail to meet the conditions of their employment.

So we'll continue to rattle the cages of those who would terminate our instigating mission, but we'll do it with a bit less trepidation than last week. Thank you, John. We needed that.

Not-Good Friday

Natural events eclipsed the human tempest (threatened department merger or elimination) my colleagues and I have been preoccupied with lately. A young mother and her 9-week old infant lost their lives and home in an instant, as a tornado gouged an ugly ten-mile swathe through this region yesterday.

Inevitably, obscenely, survivors rushed to thank God for sparing THEM.

A grinning buffoon of a minister, sporting a tee-shirt reading: "Give Blood: Play Hockey," cheerfully announced that he and his congregants couldn't wait - on this Good Friday - to see what exciting thing the Lord would cook up next.

Survivors solemnly insisted: "It's God's work." Great. As George Carlin used to wonder, incredulously: "'God's will'? Who does this guy think He is?"

Bertrand Russell had a saner perspective:

It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill?

Or storms that randomly steal the lives of young mothers and their infants?

"Mudcat"

Yesterday I enjoyed and participated in the 14th annual "Baseball in Literature and Culture" conference, with scholars from far and wide (though I had only to amble down the hall) assembling to explore and celebrate the meaning of a game. The luncheon speaker was Jim "Mudcat" Grant, one of thirteen African-American twenty-game winners chronicled in his book The Black Aces.

He spoke of visiting the White House's Previous Occupant, who had difficulty distinguishing Dontrelle Willis from Montel Williams - to Condi Rice's evident embarrassment; of "gross" memories of a brutally-segregated America from which we've just awakened; and of the joy of living long enough to be able to tell his grandchildren, with conviction, that they COULD grow up to be president themselves one day... children whose great-great grandmother was born into slavery.

Dr. Harriett Hamilton of Alabama A&M reminisced as she paged through "Daddy's Scrapbook," the sacred memory-trove of her late father Henry Kimbro - one of the great under-sung stars of the Negro Leagues.

For my part, I paid tribute to John Updike and his classic New Yorker tribute to the great Ted Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." It was my small way of bidding "Rabbit" adieu. Ted, we learned from Mudcat, was one of the too-few white stars who welcomed baseball's integration and were kind to African-American ballplayers.

I can't wait 'til next year.

SAAP

College Station, Texas. The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy yields an unfortunate acronym, but as academic organizations go it's one of the best. It's a club I'm proud to belong to, even if it does accept someone like me as a member (that's a nod to Groucho and Woody, if you don't know the line). I started attending SAAP's annual March meeting when it was still just a few years old, in the '80s. This year's gathering is the 36th, and it's being held on the home turf of the colorful and distinguished American philosopher John J. McDermott, who - with my mentor John Lachs - was present at SAAP's creation. McDermott still sounds like a New Yorker, though he's been an institution at Texas A&M for decades.

It was McDermott's critical anthologies of the writings of William James and John Dewey that really drew me into the world of classical American philosophy, and thus into the sphere of John Lachs.

This year's conference has been memorable. I've particularly enjoyed sessions devoted to the Jamesian concept of "healthy-mindedness" - a tendency to seek the good in all things, and sometimes to see it where it ain't. James himself criticized un-self-critical healthy mindedness, but was willing to concede its usefulness - in measured doses - for life in general, and for some lives especially. Happiness and how to get it is one of philosophy's perennial preoccupations, and has lately been a cottage industry with good books on the subject from the likes of Jennifer Michael Hecht, Jonathan Haidt and many others. Classical American philosophy has always had its eye on this ball.

Norris Frederick, a philosopher from Charlotte, NC, presented a particularly illuminating talk on how James' approach to teaching informed his philosophy generally. In Talks to Teachers on Psychology, and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals, published over a century ago but still fresh and relevant, James observed:

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good.

Healthy advice!

Another fine session featured James Pawelski, one of the clearest voices articulating Positive Psychology.

Mitchell Aboulafia discussed Barack Obama as Pragmatist-in-Chief.

And - most unsettling for some - Andrew Light of the Center for American Progress urged us to send our best students not to grad school and careers in academe, but into the world to save it. I'm very much in sympathy with this advice, even if it strikes some of my colleagues as a form of professional suicide. But remember Al Gore's scale: the whole planet on one side, some bars of gold on the other? It's time to save the planet.

The conference continues through tomorrow. My take-away: seek happiness, and encourage the best and brightest young minds to do that too... and oh, by the way, encourage the brightest of the bright to reclaim the mantle of "public intellectual" that has fallen dusty since Dewey's day, and try to save the world.

I'll do what I can.

John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.

Are We There Yet, Martin?

"MLK helped pave the road to the White House for Obama, but it will take more than Tuesday's inauguration to fulfill King's dream." -Joan Walsh, salon.com.

Right. It will take a recognition that we are and always have been a polyglot society. If we're going to judge Americans by the contents of their characters, we've got to stop being so fixated on their blackness and whiteness - and their redness and blueness. All of our ancestry is "mixed." We still seem pretty mixed up about that.

Patrick McGoohan, 1928-2009

Nice tree-hugger tribute to "The Prisoner" - "I am not a number, I am a free man." His appeal is still strong, because simply being a free man or woman is still more the challenge of our times.

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.