Why Philosophy Matters - Introduction

 Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it. Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science. People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big question. I’m not out to win the debate.

Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.

Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly, that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the state I live in finally caught up to me.

When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.

Atheism for the Religious and/or Spiritual 6

This is the first time I missed a February for this blog. The Ides of March have already been upon us. No excuses. I even had an idea brewing. I have a few favorite podcasts and I want to relate a couple recent episodes from one of them. It’s Bart Campolo, and he includes something from another favorite, On Being. In fact, I’ll go ahead and start with the poem, rather than try to lead up to it. 

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Everything Is Waiting for You

David Whyte
After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.


The podcast is called Humanize Me. If you follow the link you’ll see a story of a conversation with Conan O’Brien and Albert Brooks. 

The story doesn’t quite complete the answer to the question posed, can insignificance be liberating? Bart spends about a half hour filling in the blanks. It’s not some simple folksy wisdom. We’re all at different places with regards to how well known we are and how others judge our significance, but our approach to the idea of significance can have an effect on our happiness and maybe significantly more than that. He mentions the Tiger Mom who drives her kids to succeed. Whatever you think about that, it will most likely lead them to more success than if she had not done what she did. What her philosophy doesn’t talk about is that at some point in their lives, those kids will be able to make their own decisions, based on that success, and they will no longer need to be driven to succeed strictly for the goal of succeeding. They will be able to enjoy the journey they find themselves on.

With memes and commercials and self-help books and helicopter parents and just everything that is available to us at any moment, we receive a lot of wisdom in small bites, and a lot of it is not for us at this moment in our lives. Like, stopping to smell the roses is a good idea, but if you are on your way to your final exam, better not stop for too long. People will tell you all sorts of reasons for working hard and others will tell you to spend more time with your family. Others will tell you that you can have it all. What I love about Bart’s podcast is that he’s spent some time thinking about what “all” actually is.

In the story that starts this podcast, Conan O’Brien uses the example of President Calvin Coolidge and Bart has referred to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, people who have changed the world in significant ways. We don’t know much about Roosevelt’s private life, and very few people visit Coolidge’s grave. While they were alive perhaps only a hundred people knew them intimately, maybe less. When Albert Brooks tells Conan, “none of it matters”, he’s talking about his movies and his legacy and even the lives he touched because even those will pass and be forgotten. But of course, something matters. It’s true that all of us will be forgotten, so if we despair our individual inevitable end and dwell on the comparison of our accomplishments to those of great Presidents, we have miscalculated where we should be spending our emotional energy, because in the end, we all end up in that same place.

If you are focused on survival then you probably aren’t reading this. If you need to focus on survival, then do that. Hopefully you aren’t creating a sense of panic where there is no need for it. But if needed, you can find help and get to a place of comfort. There are tribes that have room for more and there are ways to find help, so do that first. If you’re already there, reflect on how that happened, what did your tribe do for you, what do you have to be thankful for? Bart tells the story of a chess mentor who teaches a young man not just to play well, but to love the game. Unfortunately, we don’t all get coaches like that, but we can hear about a story of someone who did. It comes around the middle of the podcast. I won’t spoil the story for you.

In February, this theme continued with a call in question from a 15 year old talking about her science class. It was great just to hear something so well thought out and articulated from someone her age. Bart wasn’t quite as happy with this his own answers as he usually is, so he followed up with a redo of it about a month later. I liked both episodes, but you could skip the first one and not miss much. Her question was about how to cope with the dire warnings of the future based on the climate science she is learning about.

In the first one, Bart tried to come up with some analogies, like riding a wave. You don’t control the wave, but you can control the surf board and make it to the end of the ride without getting dunked. He gets a bit dark at times and he apologies for that. He tries to end on a positive note about love. No matter when the end times occur or how, it’s still important to love your kids and appreciate the world we have now. The difficulty of this type of question is a matter of focus. The wave analogy breaks down when you start thinking about where our “waves of life” come from, the things that push us along, some of them are man-made and have levers behind them that we can get control of, and maybe we should try to grab them, instead of just going along for the ride. Or, I’d like to spend time appreciating the world, but there’s a lot of crap going on, and I’d like to fix some of it while I’m here. Bart posits that if the choices we make as individuals lead to a life well lived, then those same values should also apply to what we do as a species, as a whole.

After doing some research and giving it more thought, Bart comes up with some more solid answers to the question in episode 409. One of those is; we just aren’t wired for thinking about the future. Throughout history we’ve survived many disasters, of our own making or not, either by luck or ingenuity and that survival is both due to and feeds back into our optimism bias. I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. You can check out the optimism bias Wikipedia page and TED talks about it.

Josey, the one called in the question, is a student, so she is just learning about this looming disaster and wondering why everyone is not acting like it’s coming and like it’s the highest priority for all of humanity. Her teacher is not wired to act that way and he has other things to teach. We could get hit by a meteor, our economic system could collapse or we could create nanotechnology that gets out of control and destroys everything. He has to teach all of those things knowing that his students understanding of any one of them could cause a lot of worry. He has also known about them for a long time and has continued to keep his job and feed his family throughout, so he might not see them as worrying. I don’t know what he is thinking, but it’s poor reasoning to equate all doomsday scenarios and conclude they are all wrong because we are still here, but that is part of how our brains work.

This is a problem for anyone trying to get others to adjust their actions to actual threats. Some people will respond to fear but many will get fatigued with constant warnings that don’t appear to be near or present. If you can show that people are trying to solve this problem, even if they are failing, you’ve just shown that someone is working on it, and we can hope they succeed. There are other problems, many more immediate, that also need attention. A constant drum beat becomes background noise. Bart didn’t defend this way of thinking, he just pointed out that we do it.

This isn’t just some psychology problem to deal with when you are talking to your friends either. It is built in to our political structure. To solve the problem of despotic kings a few centuries back, we created a democratic system where leaders can be voted out every couple years. This works great for slowing the accumulation of power but it is not designed for a change in climate that is occurring over many decades. We didn’t plan for this because it is only recently that we can predict such events. It’s only the last couple hundred years that we knew the earth was more than a few million years old. It’s even more recently since we have been able to predict the weather, let alone long term climate trends. We survived a long time without thinking on these scales.

It may be that the action we need is not the technological solution, although we’ll need that too, but we won't get to that if we don’t adjust our thinking first. We need to figure out how to accept and understand the science, understand our place in a vast universe and deep time, see our part as cooperative social creatures including future generations, and learn to discuss all of this with a diverse set of people and cultures knowing our survival depends on all of us getting along in ways we have never seen in human history. That’s a pretty tall order.

At the end of this episode, Bart says the answer to the question is to listen to all his other episodes. That might sound like a cop out or a marketing ploy, but I have listened to a lot of them, so I know it’s not. Bart’s theme of building community attempts to address all of these concerns at different times and in different ways. It takes hours of discussion to even begin to chip away at this and Humanize Me is one effort to do that. They answer it from the perspective of providing comfort to each other in difficult times, even up to and including the end of the world and how to be in a world of difficult choices so we can get together and solve all the world’s problems. The bottom line answer to all those is to care and nourish those close to you and do it in a way that helps to expand that caring and nourishing out into whatever surrounds you.

The summer of Year B covers some problematic behavior of Kings in the book of Samuel
Ecclesiastes really speaks for itself
Solomon upgrades the relationship to God in Kings
There are many ways to interpret Job. One could fit with this story.

Grain of Sand

You are as insignificant as a grain of sand. It takes so many grains of sand to make a desert, each grain is insignificant. Even if that grain is taken up by an oyster and makes a pearl, then the pearl is insignificant. It's merely a reaction to an irritation.  It doesn't matter to the desert. It doesn't matter to the ocean. It doesn't matter that the ocean gives life or that it is lined with beautiful coral reefs. Those reefs are just there to be eaten by the fish and excreted as sand to be washed up on a beach and blown back into the desert. 

All of that is part of something so large that it is beyond comprehension, rendering each part insignificant. It is a vast, incomprehensible collection of insignificant things, rendering the whole just as insignificant. It could be nothing else. There is nothing against which we can judge significance. 

Your statements, your thoughts about the "is" that it is, are meaningless to all the interactions of all the galaxies and all the waves on the all the shores. Your thoughts are just that, yours. You think them. You write them down.
You speak them. You live with them.

Science of Peace

I'd like to make two observations that make a great difference in my worldview.

We are star stuff and we care about each other.

The second one is simpler, but relies on the first. I’m going to accept that we care about each other as truth without providing an explanation because the explanation is complicated and relies on assumptions and is ultimately un-provable. Call it an assertion if you want, but I call it an observation because I observe it in myself when I see any kind of story from a commercial designed to tug at my emotions to any of the great and timeless theatrical presentations or novels you might want to name.

It is not necessary to explain it, because “it” explains our mere existence. The complex organisms that we are don’t survive very well without a lot of nurturing. The first few years are literally impossible and to be anything other than an equal to any other animal in the kingdom takes several more years of attention and intervention of the natural tendencies we have to get ourselves into trouble. Anyone who has engaged in the simplest conversation with a child, who asks “why”, knows how frustrating it can be to deal with all those parts of the brain left over from earlier stages of our evolution. At some point in that conversation the adult starts to wonder why they are bothering to continue with it.

It can be logically concluded that we would not exist if we didn’t care about each other on some level that is so basic we can’t explain it with logic. At best, we would be a minor species, slightly more adaptable than others, a little better at hunting, but still vulnerable to the larger carnivores and always vulnerable to natural disasters and just as unaware of the age of the universe or its future as any other animal. We certainly would not have vehicles running on fuels or universities or grain storage or an understanding of invisible things that can poison our water. Life would be idyllic and without worries part of the time for some and a living hell for others the rest of the time. Large populations would disappear and no one would know why or for that matter, would have ever known about them it all.

We can despair in the fact that there are people who live in horrid conditions, that despite our knowledge of the universe and our ability to affect our environment, we still allow that to happen, or we can notice that we are the ones who care. We can feel small against a vast and mostly inhospitable cosmos circling above at speeds we can ‘t comprehend or we can feel big enough to do something for someone on the other side of this one little planet. We can get whatever sense of satisfaction that might bring even if that feeling is brief and only makes us more aware of the enormity of the problems that there are to solve. We can be thankful that we get to feel at all, that we have the luxury of grieving for another while we sip our coffee before heading off to whatever meaningless work we have to do for the day.

It is those moments, whether they are spent alone or with others who feel the same that bring the meaning to those day to day tasks. If you are composing a sonnet to rival Shakespeare or sending out a memo about some obligatory training session, your words, your expression of who you are, is fleeting. Very few people are remembered beyond a century and even those are not preserved well. It’s unfortunate that we hold those memorable moments in history above the moments that we have with each other. It is those moments with each other that build the foundations that give us the reason to have a history in the first place.

Civilization did not begin with some great person telling us to care for our children. It did not begin with someone providing a list of rules to live by and the need to enforce those rules because people did not understand that they needed to care about each other. By time we started writing down rules, we had been raising families and defending our way of life against others for a long time. We had run into the problem of peace through strength a long time before that. We developed any number of philosophies and rituals to deal with it and we continue to muddle through the problem today.

By any measure, by the number of weapons we possess, the number of people experiencing chronic starvation, the quality of our leaders or the number of safe neighborhoods in the world, we are still a caring and peaceful creature. We have managed to not blow ourselves up and to rebuild after disasters, human caused or otherwise. I could try to recreate one of the great observations by Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson about how amazing it is that we are here and can reflect back on what it took for us to be here, but they do it better, and it takes me too far distant from the things that actually matter to me and keep me connected to the ground that is a part of that larger thing.

It is enough to be able to look back on my own ancestry, up to the point that I can no longer name them, and then look at where they came from, the culture, the environment, everything that was needed to keep them alive, and see it is exactly the same things I need. And those things are pretty close to what every other living thing on the planet needs. And to see the larger forces like gravity and energy from the sun are needed just to hold the planet together and provide a place for life to get the whole thing going. If all of those resulted in me, and I’m occasionally able to feel happy about that and connected to it, that’s enough for me to want to figure out what I can do to keep it all going.

That’s enough for me to use that simple ability of reflecting on whatever is around me. To look up at the stars and wonder how they got there and if there is another creature somewhere looking at my home star. To see an old man walking with a child and be amazed at the years it took to create that moment. To then apply every bit of data I know and every bit of reason I have to determine what I can do right now to continue to create moments like that in the future. If those moments are fleeting, if they are just moments, that doesn't bother me. I still have those moments and we still have each other.

Deep Time

Oliver Sacks died recently. In memory of him, Neil DeGrasse Tyson replayed an episode of his show about him for Star Talk. You can look that up, I’m trying to cut back on linking things for people.

One of the stories that Sacks tells is about his mother when he was a kid. They were walking around in their yard and she told him about bees fertilizing flowers. A bit later,  they saw a Magnolia tree that was being fertilized by beetles. Why would one thing be fertilized by bees and another by beetles? Her answer was one that most mothers couldn’t provide, particularly at the time Oliver was a boy. She said it’s because that tree evolved 80,000 years ago when there were no bees, and it stuck with the beetles as its pollinator.

Upon hearing that, it gave him a rather profound experience of deep time. It’s difficult for human beings to comprehend the space of their own lifetime, let alone the lifetimes of ancestors they know about. Imagining beyond a few hundred years or into the thousands is almost impossible. We can demonstrate that things happened, show evidence for it, but keeping it straight in our heads, we just aren’t wired up for that.

The experience Sacks had is one that few people his age could have had, due simply to lack of knowledge. Most mothers didn’t know this. Fathers either. Even parents today would have trouble googling the answer, if they even noticed the beetles on the Magnolia tree. And if you go back just to your great grandparent’s time, no one knew this. No one was trying to comprehend a 13.7 billion year old universe, because we didn’t know it was that old. We didn’t even know where bees came from.

When I’m asked why I prefer science over religion, I’m sometimes asked why I prefer knowing all the answers over mystery. Well, I don’t have that preference. I don’t know all the answers so there is plenty of mystery. The question is then fine tuned to why I only accept things that are proven. Well, I don’t do that either.

I wake up in a universe full of unknowns every day. I navigate an uncertain future. I assume the sun won’t explode today, but I can’t prove it. I trust someone is keeping an eye on that and would let me know if they thought it would happen anytime soon. If we discover something today that no one expected, then I’ll work on including that in my point of view and deal with all the new questions I’ll have because of it.

More recently, a pastor from my last church put this quote on facebook:

Church never made me aware of evolution and the amazing series of unlikely events that led to a tamarack tree turning golden brown then dropping it’s needles in the Fall. At best, someone would occasionally remark on the beauty of a tree or something else amazing about “God’s creation”. I never saw how wonder is inspired by assigning nature a role of simply part of God. That puts an end to wonder. It only shifts wonder from the many discoverable details happening in front us to something that can’t be found. I’m using their definition here, gods are defined as something you seek, but you can never know or understand them completely.

Eventually it came to seem like a trick. Something to draw me in. Something I was supposed to get closer to if I read the next book or attended the next retreat, but like a radio play that always has a cliff hanger, it was more important to create a question than to seek an answer. Why do we need a god to cause us to wonder anyway? Aren’t we doing that already? We can see curiosity in other animals. We can see in artifacts when humans started to make idols and honor their dead. We went from primitive religions to the complex. We weren’t haplessly bumping around not wondering about anything until a shaman came up and told us to.

In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the man seeking enlightenment sits on a bridge and stares at the river flowing under it for days. He does this after living a long life with successes and failures. As a young man, Malidoma Some was told by his elders to stare at a tree for hours until it talked to him. Neil DeGrasse Tyson attended a planetarium when he was young and it inspired a life long love of understanding the cosmos. There’s nothing like that in the Bible. If anything, these fit Biblical descriptions of witchcraft or the dangers of philosophy. If learning by observing nature, by wondering what it can tell us, if that’s witchcraft, get my broom.