In Defense of the Fairies

There are four ways to view the relation of human and world, some being more beneficial to one's sanity and/or more faithful to reality than others.

The materialistic universes... 

Big human, small world: sometimes known as narcissism. The world is fairly dull, predictable, if not known then either easy to know or not worth knowing. The self is all important and the individual ego's perspective is privileged. The problems encountered in such a world can readily be solved by "common sense," by which one typically means what one believes to be the best course of action based on one's own values and principles.

Small human, small world: also known as pessimism and possibly cynicism, depending on how you approach it. Neatly packages the world into little categories and always deems it lacking, but sees nothing in either one's self

or in others that could answer those problems with real change.

The idealistic universes...

Big human, big world: The hero goes on an epic quest because no hero ever begins life as a hero, and yet there are always early indicators. Heracles killing the snakes in his infancy. Birth stories involving unusual parentage. But most of the great heroes are crippled by their pride. They inhabit a world filled with monsters and magic, and they meet it head on with courage, but too often, they trip over themselves and fall hard from the lofty heights. Furthermore, the world of the epics is built on the premise of the perpetual threat of war. There can be no peace where so many men go forth looking to prove themselves in battle.

Last of all, there is the small human in a big world. She shies away from the overweening pride of the heroes, but also rejects the gloom and doom of the pessimist. Humans have painfully fleeting life spans, and much of their lives are given over to uncertainty and grief. Even so, they may do their small work with cheerfulness and faith that there is more to the world than mere earth and stone. 

If I believe in fairies, it is to keep me humble while giving me strength to carry on. There is something worth fighting for, but that which we fight for fights with us, alongside us. There is more to this world than the breaths we take in this perpetual present. So why not let there be fairies?

Übungen und Arbeit

My voice is rusty this evening, and recently it feels like the worthwhile words--the juicy, salty, flavorful letters that Milo finds in the market at Dictionopolis--are hard to come by. I spend all day producing words and shaping words and restraining words. They are among the fundamental building blocks upon which so much of our work, our relationships, and our society are built. But sometimes they're not as pleasant as the ones that Milo sampled. Or perhaps (I am forgetting now) Milo did nibble on a letter that was a tad dry.

I saw the peregrine falcons that live on City Hall. In a city overflowing with human life, it is sometimes hard to catch sight of the animals that fill in the spaces that are leftover. The rooftops, the alleyways, and the great, hot, smelly out of doors. The streets often reek faintly (or less faintly) of piss and rotting trash. In the humid days of midsummer, the whole city pants against the heat as beads of sweat drip down and the persistent hum of air conditioning units nags around its ears like a particularly bloodthirsty mosquito.

But there were the falcons. They found room to nest, and they seized it as their own: great nest, querulous young, and all. Perhaps all those post-apocalyptic stories aren't so wrong when they fur all the broken down metropolises in an implacable onslaught of trees. Not that the mark of human life would be wiped out. The earth would remember us, would rightfully shake its fist at us, for all the poisons we'd leave behind. We are deists about God, but we forget that so much of our technology is not self-sustaining, would unleash destruction across the face of the planet if we were all to perish without taking steps to dispose of our nuclear reactors and our hundreds of millions of pounds of plastic waste. We, it seems, are somewhat less perfect, and so our creations must be forever guided by a final cause whose hand remains at the helm.

I used to think to myself, and sometimes still do, when I wanted to spend money that I should save, "Why would you cheat your future self? What has she done to deserve that?" And when I saw trash lying on the ground, I would say to myself, "Why not you? If not you, then someone will have to take care of it. There's no reason why it has to be someone else, when you're right here."

Sometimes I think we could all benefit from keeping those two thoughts close to the seat of our willpower. What if, instead of deliberately turning our eyes away from the future, we thought, "Why should future generations have to pay for my laziness, just because it takes a few extra minutes to scrape the peanut butter out of this glass jar to recycle it? Why should the animals and the land have to absorb toxins, just so I can have a little more convenience? And why not start now? Why wait until tomorrow? Perhaps tomorrow it will be too late." Perhaps it is already too late, and all of our yesterday selves have come to their lesson only to find that it will be taught with a stick rather than a lecture. We are bad at acting toward ends that are outside of ourselves and outside of the present moment, if those two can even be distinguished from one another (but that's a separate story).

It was funny though, that after all this time of wanting to see them, the day I finally saw the falcons they were fighting. Screeching and carrying on like two middle-aged women fighting over a lamp at a bargain sale, only instead of a lamp, one of them had breakfast in its talons. True Philadelphians. Maybe the animals aren't that far behind us. Maybe we haven't outrun them after all.

Space Age Wisdom

"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we truly are."

{Captain Jean-Luc Picard}

Changing with the Times

It's understandable that we would desire an absolute guide to how we should live. Something simple, or, if not simple, at least made familiar by habitual practice.

But there is something to this language of seasons being applied to our lives. That the circumstances might change, and with them, the best choices and courses of action that we must take if we wish to thrive.

We must live in the balance and learn to move with the moments, rather than fighting them actively or resisting them passively. 

There is so much we don't get to choose. We might as well learn to accept what is ours to work with and move on. 

Perhaps we may even be surprised by the small gifts that lie along the way--like the first ray of dawn rising on a field of frost, or the sound of blackbirds calling to one another at twilight. Gifts that would not have been ours, save for the circumstances that brought us in this moment to this place.

Anti-intellectualism in the Age of Drumpf

Hint: It's just like anti-intellectualism in all other eras of American history. With a few slight tweaks to accommodate the accidents of circumstance.

I recently finished reading Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life. He published it in the early 1960s, following on the McCarthyism of the 50s, which particularly targeted intellectuals and entertainers. I say this in part to establish his credibility. However strongly we may feel about the uniqueness of Drumpfian rhetoric, the reality is that politicians have been suspicious of the creators and critics of culture throughout history.

Part of Hofstadter's purpose in writing the book was to provide a historical overview. And while writing about "anti-intellectualism" suggests a certain bias, he does want to offer the thesis that intellectuals come under attack most frequently when they are enjoying a certain degree of prominence. How much more have the technological and scientific advances in warfare required us to rely on "experts" for our national "defense"? How often do we hear experts on economy or the Middle East called in to comment on television shows or, more importantly, to advise presidents, Congressmen, and cabinet members regarding policy decisions?

Given the abstract nature of all of this knowledge such experts sell, it's hard not to feel as if our world has somehow gotten away from us. If common sense is no longer sufficient to wisely determine our political destiny, how can we ever hope to understand it well enough to make a difference: we mere mortals, whose days are spent buying into a dream of prosperity and slogging through the tangled morass of a broken system created by our collective decisions?

I am sympathetic to the cry for a common sense philosophy of life. There's a reason why Wendell Berry's essays and poetry, his Mad Farmer rhetoric, speak to my bones. He talks of solid things in a world that is built out of information and run on attention. And he offers a welcome alternative: he is not uneducated or unintelligent, and he is certainly capable of grappling with culture and ethical problems. In other words, he is no Drumpf, preying on the fears of the people against the disturbing Other. Instead, he seeks to offer a different ideal for what life could be like, if we chose to live it on different terms and with different goals in mind.

But I'm not wholly prepared to shred up my diploma and reject all things academical, purely on the appeal of common sense. What is common sense anyway? Let us say that it is in some measure the pragmatic knowledge necessary for survival. Not only that one must eat, but that one must not eat poison or too many cookies. Not only that one should be home before dark, but that one must not appear threatening in the presence of a police officer or walk through predominantly white neighborhoods.

Oh wait.

I'm not really talking about race right now. My point was rather, that when we talk about common sense, we're talking in part about traditional or social knowledge. Survival is a very limited part of what makes up common sense, but even that which seems like it ought to be most basic is bound up in the accidental circumstances of our society. If you're a person of color, survival is not merely about getting food or shelter: it's also about deflecting the real physical threat that subconscious racism poses when it finds expression in an armed police officer doing a routine traffic stop.

This isn't to denigrate common sense as a whole. We are more apt to decry the lack of it than to wish for it to be done away with entirely. My point is rather that as a foundation for life and as the source of a holistic worldview, common sense can only get you so far, again because it is a product of your society's circumstances.

Common sense hasn't always had the meaning that it has taken on today. It was a philosophical term used in discussions of the mind-body problem (i.e. how do the mind and body relate? is the mind of the same substance as the body and if so, where is it located? if it is not of the same substance, is the mind immortal? and so forth) and more generally of perception. The common sense was simply the organ of the mind whereby all of the different sensory data where compiled into one. Hearing being fundamentally different from touch or from sight, they could not all be perceived by the same organs, but something had to bring all of those perceptions together, and that organ was the common sense.

Taken in that light, common sense is quite raw and uncritical. The common sense belonged to the lower faculties of the brain, the animal powers as it were. It was simply combinatory in nature. The processes of pattern recognition or of critical analysis would not take place at that level.

And it seems like this is what we are being urged toward when we are told to take a common sense view of things--and to discard the bombastic, empty pronouncements of the intellectuals. Take the world as it presents itself to you. What you see is what there is. Appearances are the only thing that there is.

...Denying, all the while, that your senses are not selectively attentive, shaped by myriad, minuscule, unconscious influences from the tone of a man's voice when he talks down to a woman to the perennial aesthetic association of darkness with evil to the blockbuster movies that are somehow always about white people romancing or white people fighting crime or white people having dramatic family redemption stories.

Clearly neither camp has it quite right. If you spend too much time up in the ivory tower, you'll lose touch with the world that can't be contained inside your head and go mad, like Chesterton's mathematician for whom the only cure was poetry. If you react purely on your gut without critical evaluation, you'll make poor decisions based on immediately available information and lack the faculties necessary to change your life for the better.

I suppose it's just the struggle to figure out which one to trust in the moment that I find hard. It's rarely difficult to think something out, once you have a few tools, but it always seems to be so difficult to apply it.