A priest and a prophet

 When I was in junior high, I got into a war of wills with my mother. She was a hardcore Episcopalian, and was hellbent, no pun intended, on me getting confirmed in the church.

At the time, I had just emerged (mostly) from my nihilistic juvenile delinquent phase but had no interest whatsoever in religion

We butted heads but eventually struck a deal: I’d go to confirmation classes with Father Bill Kirkland, the new priest at St. Timothy’s in Hurricane, and then make my own decision.

Kirkland was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known, although I was slow in recognizing it. He was raised in rural Georgia as a severe fundamentalist, attending a very strict Baptist college with the original John Birch, for whom the hardcore rightwing conspiracy theory-believing John Birch Society was named.

Kirkland eventually moved on theologically but didn’t give up on religion. After serving in WW2, he studied theology at Edinburgh and at the famous Union Theological Seminary in New York. He taught philosophy at what would become the University of Charleston.

After a few classes, I began to conclude that this whole thing might not be as dumb as I thought. It apparently stuck, despite my best efforts to escape.

Kirkland was active and unafraid to speak out for social justice, but mostly he attended to priestly duties, celebrating sacraments, visiting congregants, comforting the sick, putting the dead to rest. After he retired, his ministry consisted of walking the dogs at the local animal shelter. 

The course of my life would probably have been very different without his influence. He reminds me of a cryptic line from Psalm 110 about a mysterious holy man who blessed Abraham in Genesis: “Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”

I didn’t realize for years that he was a direct student of one of the greatest and most influential theologians of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), who left his mark in the halls of congress and on the picket lines of the labor and Civil Rights Movement.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Niebuhr’s “unswerving devotion to the ideals of freedom and justice”

I’d heard about Niebuhr for years, but my interest peaked years ago after reading Parting the Waters, the first volume of Taylor Branch’s powerful study of America in the King years. By then, I’d been working for the American Friends Service Committee for a few years, an organization that had close ties to Dr. King and others in the movement. I learned from Branch that Niebuhr was a major influence on King and many others. He has been claimed by people across the political spectrum—even people who weren’t religious.

Naturally, Kirkland was glad to share his memories of Niebuhr. I also took a l deep dive into his writings.

Niebuhr took the concept of sin seriously, but not the way we often use the term. He thought of it less as this or that misdeed but rather the all-too-human tendency to put ourselves and especially the groups we identify with (ethnic, racial, religious, national, political, etc.) at the center of the universe. If we all have this tendency as individuals, it is multiplied when we come to group behavior and social systems. Most individuals have consciences, but often the closest thing to the conscience of a group is its persecuted and despised minority. 

He was fond of quoting St. Augustine (354-430) as saying that “Without justice what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? And what is a band of robbers but such a kingdom in miniature?”

He also reminded us that we are often most dangerous when we think we’re the most righteous. You can call it human weakness, original sin, or evolutionary baggage, but ignore it at your peril. Many of the worst atrocities in history have been committed by true believers of one stripe or another who were sure they were right.

In Niebuhr’s view, there is no such thing as absolute purity. Human motivations are always ambiguous, and the conflicts of the world are between sinners, not between the totally evil and the totally righteous. That view may seem grim, but it’s a pretty good antidote for self-righteousness.

But if all are sinners, all haven’t done the same amount of damage. He called this “the equality of sin and the inequality of guilt.” There is a huge difference between the Roosevelts and the Hitlers of the world, one that matters.

This assessment of human nature challenges the ideas of inevitable progress or utopias, but the news about human nature wasn’t all bad. In addition to original sin, we’re also gifted with “original justice.” These views have profound political implications: to paraphrase a famous Niebuhr quote, our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but our capacity for injustice makes it necessary.

For Dr. King, his theology was an antidote to “the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism” and “a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man’s [sic] existence.” According to Branch, King “came to describe Niebuhr as a prime influence on his life, and sometimes referred to Gandhian nonviolence as “a Niebuhrian stratagem of power.’”

In 1965, King invited Niebuhr, then 73, to participate in the famous march on Selma. He replied with regret that “Only a severe stroke prevents me from accepting … I hope there will be a massive demonstration of all the citizens with conscience in favor of the elemental human rights of voting and freedom of assembly.”

I’m grateful that, thanks to Kirkland, Niebuhr is part of my lineage. I learned this from him: a good society or group is one that is structured in such a way as to limit the amount of damage we can do to each other.

(This appeared as a column in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

How I survived year one of the Cheeto Apocalypse (although there are a few days left)

(2017 would have gone much better if Arpad the Magnificent, pictured above, was still around)

Well, year one of America's latest dark journey is about to end. I can't say I'll miss it much.

Greed and hatred triumphant. Fascism and white supremacy's moment in the sun. Sealing the deal on oligarchy. Still there were moments.

In this post, I want to write a bit about how I got through it. I'm interested in your ideas as well. After all, the dark journey isn't anywhere near over yet. So, in no particular order, here goes:

1. Obviously, certain people and animals helped, starting with La Cabrera my partner.
Without her there wouldn't even be goats to name and exploit in this blog. Then there are friends, family (literal and metaphorical) and comrades, with some overlap there. I've been blessed to have a great group of people to work and talk **** with. It's also been a pretty good year for gallows humor.

2. Spy novels. A while back I listened to a lecture series on the history of espionage. The lecturer mentioned some notable fiction on this subject, including the novels of Alan Furst, which are all set in the 1930s and 40s and deal with resistance to the Nazis, which for some unknown reason seemed to fit my mood. I devoured all 14 one after another. He needs to get busy again. (Now I'm on John LeCarre, although I read him more for nostalgia about the good old days of the Cold War, which may not have been what the author was going for.)

3. Hoopla. My local public library, which hasn't been privatized and auctioned off just yet, has this feature by which you can download books (audio and electronic), music, and videos to smartphones and other devices. I go through tons of audiobooks while driving, running and doing tasks that don't take a lot of thought (my favorite kind). With CD books, I was always at risk of misplacing and losing discs, which was a pain. Hoopla changed all that. Hoopla also helped me take a...

4. Wisdom bath. With Hoopla's help I was able to listen to unabridged recordings of Herodotus' The Histories, Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, and Plutarch's Lives. I'd read them all before at least once, but it was nice to pound them down in order. Herodotus's story of the Greco-Persian War, heavy on wonders and tall tales, is a moral study of the dangers of hubris. Plutarch has been mined for 2000 years for lessons and inspiration. His Lives were also the source of several of Shakespeare's plays. Thucydides' no-nonsense account of how a great democracy went off the rails was like a warning.

5. The Resistance. I couldn't believe the size of the Women's March in Washington, in Charleston and around the country--or the many groups springing up around WV and elsewhere which are determined to fight back.

I had the privilege to travel around the state to meet and work with "new" and "old" groups of people committed to social justice from Huntington to Concord to Lewisburg to Parkersburg to Wheeling to Buckhannon to Morgantown to  Berkeley Springs to Charles Town, with plenty of stops in between. To use the language of spy novels (see #1) this meant many more assets to work with.

7. The fights. There were several in the legislature, a few of which were successful. Much of the year was devoted to trying to preserve recent gains in health coverage, particularly Medicaid expansion, which brought coverage to around 175,000 working West Virginians. At first it looked like flat-out ACA repeal was a slam dunk but that didn't happen, thanks to the hard work of people all over WV and the nation. Then there was the #taxscam tax reform fight, which didn't go as well. More fights, starting with CHIP reauthorization, are on their way. It may not have done any good, but I was also lucky enough to have some soapboxes to rant from in the form of newspapers, radio and such.

8. Physical activity. No marathon this year (but watch out, 2018!) but there were plenty of foot miles slogged, not to mention martial arts, yoga and such. I'm especially grateful to my Okinawan karate lineage, which includes legends like Funakoshi, Itosu, Kyan, Matsumura and Sakugawa.

9. Coffee and box wine, for obvious reasons and at different times of day. Oh yeah, and some attendance of Episcopal church services.

10. Myths, stories and ancient teachings. The Buddha on impermanence, insubstantiality and suffering. The Bhagavad Gita on following one's path or dharma: "It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's." The Norse idea of Ragnarok, a final battle doomed to fail but still worth fighting. Dante's allegory of the need for both human effort and divine grace.

Then there's Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe," an unexpected turn of events that brings good news when all seems hopeless. One of those would be nice right about now. Who knows--we might even get one in the new year.

Philosophical bugs

It's interesting how references to animals show up in philosophy. Plato put in a good word for some dogs in The Republic, comparing their traits of bravery and loyalty to guardians of the ideal city.

Hegel remarked that the owl of Minerva (Roman name for the Greek wisdom goddess Athena) "spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." I take that to mean that we mostly figure things out when they are over--or when it's too late.

Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak we couldn't understand him (I disagree with him for reasons elaborated here).

Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay about foxes and hedgehogs, quoting a Greek poet as saying that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

I recently stumbled on another philosophical animal reference from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) from his New Organon:

Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

I don't usually think of myself as a Bacon fan, but that is a pretty good way of stating the need for balance between data and perspective.

Plus, bugs are cool.

Do you feel lucky today?

I’ve been musing lately about the role of luck in human affairs. By luck, I mean things that affect us for good or ill that we can’t anticipate or control. We go through our lives bouncing between automatic pilot and conscious planning, but even when we try to leave nothing to chance, the universe gets a vote.

Even when things work according to plan, I’d say we were lucky. Think of all the things that could have gone wrong but didn’t.

The biblical book of Ecclesiastes sums it up: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.”

Similarly, I found this quote by American philosopher John Dewey:

“No one knows what a year or even a day may bring forth, the healthy become ill; the rich poor; the mighty are cast down, fame changes to obloquy. Men live at the mercy of forces they cannot control. Belief in fortune and luck, good and evil, is one of the most widespread and persistent of human beliefs. Chance has been deified by many peoples. Fate has been set up as an overlord to whom even the Gods must bow. Belief in a Goddess of Luck is in ill repute among pious folk but their belief in providence is a tribute to the fact no individual controls his own destiny.”

A lot of our lives is conditioned by things we have no control over — the genetic dice our parents rolled when we were conceived, or their bank accounts and zip codes at the time.

I’ve also been struck by the idea of “moral luck” as developed by philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. It works something like this: We praise or blame people for actions, as if everything was up to the individual. But in real life, what people do or don’t is often as much a matter of time and chance as choice.

Consider a soldier who commits atrocities in a war. Would he or she have done the same without war? Or what if people who did evil in a dictatorship were born in a different country and/or under a different system?

Consider a car accident. Most of us have zoned out at a stop sign or neglected to obey a speed limit. Driver X runs a light and nothing happens, but with Driver Y innocent people are killed. Both are blameworthy for not paying attention, but the results are vastly different. We tend to blame one more, but the actions were the same. The main difference is luck.

Looking back at my life, the fact that I didn’t get into more serious trouble had more to do with luck than anything. Virtue is often a matter of chance and opportunity.

It’s also fascinating how different religions have incorporated luck and apparent randomness into their beliefs and practices.

In the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament, divination was performed with dice- or coin-like urim and thummin to determine the will of God. These were objects connected with the breastplate of the high priest. In the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, the 11 remaining disciples cast lots to see who would be selected to fill the void left by Judas.

In Chinese tradition, people threw yarrow stalks (or nowadays, flip coins) to consult the I Ching, an ancient book of oracles. Many peoples have attempted to read signs from things like the flight of birds or the entrails of sacrificial animals. Cards have been used for similar purposes. Even people who make fun of superstition sometimes flip a coin to make a decision.

Some traditions even make chance or luck divine, as in the Greek goddess Tyche, who morphed into the longer-lived Roman goddess Fortuna. Fortuna has been described as the one pagan goddess to survive into the Christian era.

Her main symbol is the famous wheel, which gave us the TV game show of the same name. The fact that this image has lasted so long in popular culture speaks of its power. As you know if you’ve ridden a Ferris wheel, sometimes you’re up and sometimes down. As the ancient Roman writer Seneca said, “Whatever Fortune has raised on high, she lifts but to bring low.”

Fortuna’s wheel is a good image to recall as we navigate life’s changes. If things are going good, don’t assume they always will be. If things are bad, this too can change. Nobody owns Fortuna.

One interesting effort to grapple with this is the situation of the Roman patrician Boethius (circa 480-525), who held high office between the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages. Rome was under the power of the Ostrogoth. Boethius fell afoul of King Theodoric, was stripped of wealth and position, imprisoned and sentenced to be executed in a pretty nasty way.

There he composed a classic work, “The Consolation of Philosophy,” in which Lady Philosophy visits and instructs him so he can face death with composure. While that might sound contrived, his situation was all too real.

His basic point is that it’s the nature of Fortune to change. Those who put themselves in her power by basing happiness on things they can’t control are helpless when things change — as they will.

Fortuna says: “Here is the source of my power, the game I always play: I spin my wheel and find pleasure in raising the low to a high place and lowering those who were on top. Go up, if you like, but only on condition that you will not feel abused when my sport requires your fall.”

As powerful as she is, however, she can’t dictate how we respond to her. There’s an old-wisdom tradition that says while we can’t control events, we can control our responses to them and thus acquire a degree of independence from fortune. Alas, that’s easier said than done.


“Dante’s Inferno” portrays Fortuna as God’s agent in bringing change to the world: “… he ordained a general minister and leader/who would transfer from time to time the empty goods from one people to another, from one family to another, beyond any human wisdom’s power to prevent.”

Though we may curse her, “she is blessed in herself and does not listen … she gladly turns her sphere and rejoices in her blessedness.”

Love Fortuna or hate her, the bottom line is we’re all subject — to some degree — to forces beyond our control, whether we see these as inscrutable providence or random chance. In that case, maybe we should be a little easier on each other.

In any case, good luck! We’ll need it.

(This op-ed of mine ran in Sunday's Gazette-Mail)

One more for the road

Yesterday's post highlighted one of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's great nuggets. A few people really enjoyed that. Fortunately, there are plenty more where that one came from. Here's one that is sadly all too true all too often:

"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching into battle against an enemy."

 And speaking of bad reasons and bad things generally, here's a look at what House and Senate Republicans are proposing about the federal budget.

More of a tweet really

One of things I love about Nietzsche is his ability to pack a whole essay or maybe even a book into a single sentence. One of my favorites is about how our sincere attachment to bad or false ideas can do more damage than deliberate falsehoods. Think Bush building up to Iraq invasion, European war plans in 1914, tinkle down economics, utopias induced by violence, etc. etc. etc.

Here's the passage:

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

An ethical dilemma

El Cabrero is not one to shy away from deep philosophical issues or ethical dilemmas. Especially if they involve profound questions, such as under what conditions is a person allowed to wear a tee shirt from an endurance event, a topic I've blogged about more than once.

To start with, there is the basic proposition that it is an act of arrogance and hubris to wear a tee shirt for an event before one actually completes it. It's like the same point from Herodotus' Histories where he tells the story of Solon's maxim of calling no one happy until you have seen their last hours.

Then there is the proposition that one does not deserve to wear the tee shirt of a race one began but didn't finish. Once, shortly after having heart surgery, I signed up for a triathlon. The water in Summit Lake was ice cold (to me anyway) and I couldn't breathe and didn't finish. I never wore the shirt.

Circumstances have recently forced me to grapple with another tee shirt dilemma. I was planning on running a 15K trail run this weekend but was stranded by the miseries of air travel. In this case, the Spousal Unit picked up my package thinking I'd be there in time.

I'm thinking that since I probably would have finished it if Delta had gotten me home on the right day, even if it meant crawling across the finish line on bloody stumps, I have the ethical right to wear the shirt, as long as I complete a 15K at some point.

Judges?

PAUL RYAN GETS SCHOOLED ON POVERTY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Kant believe it

It's been a few days since I was struck by a news item from Russia, but I'm finally getting down to blogging about it. It seems that two young men there struck up a conversation about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant that degenerated first into a fist fight and then into gun shots.

News reports did not specifically identify which aspect of the 18th century philosopher's work set off the quarrel.

I have a pet theory. It would be supremely ironic if the argument turned out to be over which of Kant's two main formulations of the ethical categorical imperative was best. Maybe it went down something like this:

Person 1: I believe that one should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction."

Person 2: That's bull***t. One should "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

Person 1: I got your end right here, you Bozo...

And so it goes. At least nobody was killed. All I can say is it's a good thing they weren't arguing about Nietzsche.

OVER COMING AN OBSESSION. How about that Pope, anyway?

SPEAKING OF WHOM, Francis would consider cutting food stamp benefits for poor Americans to be supremely tacky. Some friends of mine in WV made some noise about that yesterday.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This must be my week for interesting encounters and unlikely conversations. Yesterday, I headed down to McDowell County to do spend the afternoon with some children in a summer program. McDowell is one of the poorest and most economically distressed counties in the nation. The kids were in Keystone, a predominately African-American community which is a pretty marginalized place in a very marginalized county.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I didn't find it. When I got there, there were three other people who planned on meeting with this small group of kids, including a representative of US Senator Joe Manchin, one from Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, and a member of the WV House of Delegates.

For real. How cool was that?

As if that wasn't odd enough, the delegate began his presentation to the kids, one of whom was as young as six, with a Latin quote from philosopher Rene Descartes. You guessed it, "cogito ergo sum." He then discussed the implications of "I think, therefore I am" in ways that Descartes never would have thought of. And they got it.

I don't know about you, but generally speaking I can go for a pretty long time in this state without running into someone, much less an elected official, who brings up 17 century French philosophers.

You just never know.

SUPERSIZE THIS. Fast food workers are on the move for a living wage.

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. It's bad for the brain and doesn't exactly bring out the best in people.

"LIBERTARIAN POPULISM." According to Michael Lind, it's Ayn Rand in disguise.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

With a friend like this...

I have this friend named Jeff who is really a nice guy. On the surface anyway. In fact, he's an ordained Methodist minister. But what kind of friend is it who knows that someone is an addicted to something and gets them going on a binge?

The addiction in question is one of several of mine, to wit reading Tolkien. It's not an everyday thing. I can go years or even decades without touching the stuff, but when something gets me started again, I can't stop myself and have to re-read the whole Ring cycle.

It all started innocently enough when we were musing, as we often do, that working for social justice in WV is a bit like being stuck in the early part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Dark lords rising, sinister forces threatening Middle Earth, damage being done that can never be undone. Many defeats and fruitless victories.

But then he tempted me with books I had not read on Tolkien's life and work and before you could say "Attercop!" (something giant spiders in The Hobbit hated to be called) I was hooked again. Now I'm several hundred pages into the whole thing again with more than that to go.

Thanks a lot, pal...

MIXED SIGNALS. Although jobless claims rose a bit last week, new job growth in the private sector surpassed expectations.

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE. Despite a serious downturn, government policies--particularly those related to the Recovery Act--kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty.

NO SURPRISE, BUT STILL IMPORTANT. The wealth gap between the richest one percent and everyone else has gotten bigger in the Great Recession.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. More water problems have been found by investigators of the Massey mine disaster.

HAST ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THEE, SHEPHERD? These may be hard times for philosophy in an age of academic budget cuts, but it seems to be doing just fine at one community college.

PLAY ON. There's a movement to bring back imagination to children's play.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Philosophical dead ends

I have a great love of philosophy, although certain schools of it don't do anything for me. Some of the ones I have no use for are logical positivism, analytical philosophy, and the philosophy of language.

I have a new one to add to the list: the philosophy of mind. There is something inherently absurd to me about conscious people intentionally spending a lot of time arguing about whether consciousness and intentionality exist. Another favorite topic of such thinkers is whether consciousness is entirely physical and whether mental phenomena, if they exist, can influence physical phenomena. It occurs to me they could ask any doctor about that one.

If I'm going to spend any time reading about the mind, whatever it is, I'll probably try to stick either to the sciences devoted to such things or to real philosophers like Kant and Hegel, who may not have been right but were at least interesting. The main point of philosophy is not so much to be right as to be interestingly but creatively wrong.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this.

BIG LIES about government spending, according to Robert Reich, are hiding the bigger truth about growing inequality.

GREEN JOBS aren't just for blue states.

LANDMARK. Massey Energy reached a settlement in a lawsuit with the Labor Department over major safety problems in a Kentucky mine. Too bad something like this didn't happen at Upper Big Branch before last April.

NO COMMENT. Could exercising make you want to drink more alcohol?

TWO FOR THE BIRDS. Crows...the other tool using animal. And, while we're at it, some ancient flightless birds apparently used wings as clubs. Would that count?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Goat Rope books shelf: religion and philosophy

During Slacker Week, i.e. those days between Christmas and New Year's Day, El Cabrero is doing as little as possible other than looking back at the year in reading. I was not particularly in a religious mode this year, if you don't count karate (which actually works pretty well as one), but I did read a bit about religion.

I don't always enjoy Karen Armstrong's books on religion, although I always seem to read them. I did enjoy one of her more recent books, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.

I'm always a sucker for a good book on Buddhism, and Perry Garfinkel's Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All fit the bill.

I paid another visit to Aristotle this year, re-reading The Nichomachean Ethics and The Politics, along with Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. On the down side, I crawled through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and still don't know what all the shouting was about. It goes without saying that I revisited my old pal Nietzsche

Just say yes

I wouldn't recommend carrying a copy of Nietzsche whilst deer hunting to everyone, but it works for me. The deer weren't in the neighborhood at the time anyway so the book was good company.

Nietzsche is sometimes called a nihilist, but that is far from the truth. His main quarrel with many kinds of religion and philosophical idealism was that they were nihilistic to his way of thinking in that they sought for some other reality beyond the one we live in.

One theme of his that shows up again and again is the challenge to say "yes" to life in spite of all its nastiness, or, to put it another way, to try to live in such a way that we can and want to say yes to the whole package. Here's how he expresses it in terms of a New Year's resolution:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati [love of fate]: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole, some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

DENIED. A move to extend emergency unemployment insurance failed in the Senate. But the banks are doing fine.

HIGHLIGHTING HISTORY. A new map and poster highlight black history in West Virginia and the many ways events here have shaped the nation.

THE MEANING OF LIFE. Some people do just fine without worrying about it.

ANIMAL EXTINCTIONS are bad for your health.

AT LEAST THERE'S NO SHORTAGE of stars.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Nothing or interesting

Deer season in West Virginia came in last week. While I'm not exactly on the hunting varsity team, I did spend a bit of time in the woods.

Even though no deer came my way, I find there's a lot to be said for sitting quietly in the woods and just watching and listening. In my case, there were plenty of squirrels raising hell and lots of woodpecker action.

I also used the time on the hill to re-read another book of my old pal Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sometimes also known as The Joyful Wisdom. If someone asked what the book was about, I'd be hard pressed to answer except to say "all kinds of things."

Nietzsche is the master of the one liner or short epigram. Here are a few that caught my eye this time around:

After a great victory.--What is best about a great victory is that it liberates the victor from the fear of defeat. "Why not be defeated some time, too?" he says to himself; "Now I am rich enough for that.

Always in our company.--Whatever in nature and in history is of my own kind, speaks to me, spurs me on, and comforts me; the rest I do not hear or forget right away. We are always only in our own company.

Against many a defense.--The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Against embarassment.--If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarassment.

I especially like this one:

Dreams.--Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life in the same way: nothing or interesting.

A BETTER WAY. The Economic Policy Institute, Demos, and The Century Foundation have come up with an alternative for dealing with deficits and the recession.

GOT SPINE? Here's a call for progressive backbone in the deficit debate.

CHILD POVERTY. Also from EPI, this snapshot shows that the Great Recession pushed more children into poverty.

MAGICAL THINKING, revisited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

About that lion

Ask this guy.

I've always loved philosophy, but there are certain schools of it that do nothing for me. Among these are logical positivism, analytical philosophy and schools that focus on things like grammar and language. Life's too short.

One person who has connections to those schools enjoys a huge international following: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I don't get the attraction.

A while back, someone loaned me a copy of what many people consider to be his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. I dutifully waded through it in hopes of changing my mind. It didn't happen, although there were a few good lines here and there.

I'm about to take issue with one of the most famous of those. In that book, Wittgenstein said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That might be true of things like sea cucumbers, but lions are mammals and we share a lot of similarities in the brain with them, especially in those regions of the brain that have to do with emotions.

I don't think that lions particularly need to talk, although one could argue that they already do non-verbally. But if they did, I think it would be pretty clear. I also have a feeling that most of what they would say would take the form of commands and declarative statements.

They probably wouldn't ask a lot of questions. Or need to.

CUTTING ALONE WON'T DO IT. People concerned about deficits would do well to think less about across the board cuts than about promoting economic growth, according to this analysis in the NY Times.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's an interesting twist in the Massey mine disaster investigation.

PREJUDICE. Scientific research suggests it may be more ingrained than we like to think, but there are ways of countering it.

WANT TO BE HAPPIER? Try focusing. Wandering minds apparently gather negative thoughts.

MORE ON THOSE NEANDERTHALS. Maybe the human edge over our Neanderthal cousins had something to do with our slow growth to maturity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Useful errors

I was in an interesting conversation this weekend about the root causes of social problems, which caused me to start thinking about the slippery issue of causality. Or maybe not.

The human tendency to think in terms of cause and effect is deeply ingrained and probably has roots in evolutionary biology. Being able to infer causal patterns was no doubt adaptive in relatively the simple environments in which early humans lived.

The problem comes when we all too readily assume that causal explanations we find satisfying are true. Natural selection, that "blind watchmaker", doesn't really care about truth; it just cares about what is useful.

My old pal Friedrich Nietzsche put it this way:

Throughout immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them proved to be useful and preservative of the species: he who fell in with them, or inherited them, waged the battle for himself and his offspring with better success.

Thought for the day: would you prefer truth without utility or utility without truth?

UNUSEFUL UNTRUTHS. Paul Krugman takes aim at the prevailing narrative on the economy and the recession.

CORRUPTION. Big money, sleazy politics.

SOCIAL ANIMALS. Research on twins suggests that people are socially oriented even before birth.

DEATH BY BREAKFAST. Here's a look at some unhealthy menu items.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Passion

I have a soft spot for the German philosopher Hegel, who once described world history--all too well--as "this slaughter-bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed..."

He also had this to say about what it takes to get things done:

We say, therefore, that nothing at all has come to pass without the interest of those whose activity is involved in it. And since we call an interest a "passion"--when all of one's individuality, to the neglect of all other interests and purposes one might have, is placed in the service of some cause; and every fiber of one's being, every last ounce of will-power is committed to it, so that all of one's needs and forces are concentrated upon it--we must assert as a general proposition that nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion.

PREJUDICE is bad for your health.

YOU MIGHT NEED A (GOOD) WEATHERMAN or weather woman to know which way the climate change wind blows.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's another one on the same subject.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The tonic of wildness

It's not snake oil.

El Cabrero has been listening these days to a recording of Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being. It's not as fun as the gross vampire novel I mentioned earlier this week, but one cannot live on popcorn.

In the book, Hawken credits Henry David Thoreau with being a founder of both the environmental and social justice movements. I think he has a point, although I don't picture Henry as much of a movement guy. He was an enthusiastic abolitionist and critic of the predatory war against Mexico.

There's no way to deny that his writings were very influential in the early environmental movement, especially in terms of consciousness raising. Here's an eloquent example of this from Walden:

We need the tonic of wildness,--to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander...

The wild, alas, has been taking some major hits lately.

PILING ON. Here's another argument about how deficit mania could actually make the recession worse.

OUR BIGGEST DEFICIT might be one of confidence.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM. The Obama administration this week unveiled and ambitious plan to end homelessness in 10 years.

FEELING PHILOSOPHICAL? Here's a long interview with Martha Nussbaum, who in my book is one of the best.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

If cattle had hands...

The ideas that individuals and groups have about God and/or the gods tells us a lot about the former but not necessarily anything about the latter. As the pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes put it,

if cattle and horses and lions had hands
or could paint with their hands and create works such as men do,
horses like horses and cattle like cattle
also would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies
of such a sort as the form they themselves have.

DERAILING THE RECOVERY. Cuts to programs like unemployment and COBRA would add to the current misery without helping the economy.

FELICITY. Happiness may come with age, but there's more to the story.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. According to the latest polling, most Americans want to give the new law a chance.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A two edged sword

"Those who benefit from social injustice are naturally less capable of understanding its real character than those who suffer from it."

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhur's Moral Man and Immoral Society is basically a deconstruction of political utopianism. His main point is that social life will always be an arena of struggle given that fact that groups amplify all the flaws of human nature.

He is skeptical of many things that people of various times and places hoped would remedy social ills--including religion. In the past, it wasn't uncommon for people to believe that the civilizing influence of religion would gradually lead to a just and good society.

To some degree it has. The influence of Buddhism seemed to mellow out peoples such as the Mongols and Tibetans. The early Christian church, once it emerged from illegal status, put an end to the practice of crucifixion and gladiatorial spectacles (although it didn't take too many centuries before the church outdid even these with inquisitions and witch burning).

But he viewed religion historically is a two-edged sword. It can lead to greater social justice, but it can also justify injustice with other-worldliness or sanctify cruelty with the belief that God is on one's side. Without engaging in religion bashing, it's hard to deny that there's plenty of that to go around these days.

WHACKADOODLISM. Paul Krugman's latest op-ed is on the growth of right wing extremism in the wake of the recession.

LICENSCE REVOKED. I was stunned to learn recently that the clerical license of my friend the Rev. Jim Lewis has revoked by the Episcopal bishop of WV. Here's an op-ed questioning that decision.

TEACHERS AS TARGETS. It kind of looks like teachers are the scapegoats for all that is wrong in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia these days.

HAST ANY PHILOSOPHY IN THEE, SHEPHERD? A new online series tackles the subject.

THE EARLY BIRD probably didn't fly too well.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED