A beach day

Not in the best of health. Even so, I spent the day out with my family, at a museum and at a windy, chilly Lake Michigan beach. We were joined by my old schoolmate, Dan, and his family. Funny how bearable an illness can be with old friends nearby. There were billowy clouds and lovely, white-tipped waves; we didn’t bathe, but the children enjoyed the playground. Daniel (my son) was so delighted that at leaving-time, he had to be carried away against his will (mercifully, he scaled the biggest hill himself).

We were mostly in touristy St. Joseph but also drove through Benton Harbor, the poorer twin, which has run-down churches with names like Aún Hay Esperanza.

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I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which I found in our local library’s equivalent of the Little Free Library. Ursula Todd (1910–1910, 1910–1914, etc.) lives, dies, is reborn, and lives her same life again. And again. Her lifespan lengthens because déjà vu teaches her to avoid mishaps. (It takes her a few tries to figure out how to avoid getting Spanish flu.) It’s like watching a video gamer replaying levels; or Groundhog Day, set in Downton Abbey’s England, not Punxsutawney. Atkinson skewers some characters, especially the loathsome doctor who delivers Ursula (the girl sometimes survives his care, sometimes doesn’t). The repetition is macabre and funny. Working out the metaphysic isn’t easy. Michael Huemer’s theory of reincarnation comes closest, perhaps. But on that theory the déjà vu wouldn’t transmit real memories; and it would be unlikely – or, strictly speaking, rare – that the same siblings should be sired after Ursula.

Eating and reading: A report

The eating begins in earnest just before Halloween and continues through December. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere cools. One becomes sluggish.

I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.

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Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:

• Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I read this in high school and again in college)
• John Hersey, Hiroshima (I read this in high school, too)
• C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (I don’t know how many times I’ve read this; I’d forgotten how odd it is when Aslan, Susan, and Lucy frolic with Greek mythic figures – Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads – while the chaps are at war)
• Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale
• Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (my first Maigret novel – only seventy-four to go after this one)

You’d think I’d polish ’em off in one sitting, but that’s not how I do it: I like to drag ’em out.

Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.

This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).

Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.

And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)

Stay gold, Michael Huemer, stay gold.

October’s poem

Chinua Achebe, “NON-commitment” (1970):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hurrah! to them who do nothing

see nothing feel nothing whose

hearts are fitted with prudence

like a diaphragm across

womb’s beckoning doorway to bar

the scandal of seminal rage. I’m

told the owl too wears wisdom

in a ring of defense round

each vulnerable eye securing it fast

against the darts of sight. Long ago

in the Middle East Pontius Pilate

openly washed involvement off his

white hands and became famous. (Of all

the Roman officials before him and after

who else is talked about

every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And

talking of apostles that other fellow

Judas wasn’t such a fool

either; though much maligned by

succeeding generations the fact remains

he alone in that motley crowd

had sense enough to tell a doomed

movement when he saw one

and get out quick, a nice little

packet bulging his coat pocket

into the bargain – sensible fellow.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Dante puts Judas near the bottom of Hell, with the traitors. Pilate is not brought down so low: he is with the self-centered opportunists (that is, if lines 55–57 of canto III refer to Pilate, which is controversial).

So: is “noncommitment” more like malicious treachery? Or is it more like opportunistic indifference to the good?

Or is “noncommitment” not a single and genuine kind of sin but an artificial, gerrymandered sin?

Or does Achebe (or Dante) simply get the exemplars wrong and accuse Judas, or Pilate, or both of them, of the wrong kind of sin?

I wish I could say these sorts of philosophical questions are slowing down my reading of the Inferno, but, the truth is, I’m mostly ignoring them and plowing on ahead.

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In a recent interview, Michael Huemer says:

In the first day of one history class in elementary school, I thought that I liked history, but I later learned that I’d been tricked. The teacher (Mrs. Denison) had started a discussion of the question, “Who discovered America?” It was traditionally said that Columbus discovered it. But wait, there were already Indians (that’s what people called the Native Americans then!) living in America when Columbus arrived. Also, there was evidence that Leif Erikson had traveled to America hundreds of years before Columbus. Etc. I thought this was a great discussion. But as I was later to learn, that wasn’t typical of history classes, that was really more like a philosophy discussion, and I actually hated what history classes were normally like.

In another elementary school class, the teacher read a story in which a king had promised some big prize to any hero who could save his daughter from, well, something bad that had taken her captive. I don’t remember the details, except that basically three people wound up all contributing to saving the princess. Each one (as I would now describe it) provided a causally necessary but insufficient condition on the rescue. We then had a discussion of the question: Who gets the prize? Again, I thought that was a great discussion. As I much later recognized, that was also a philosophical discussion.

And it continued like that throughout all my years of schooling. All the really good classes that I ever had were discussions about questions that I would later recognize as philosophical questions, or at least philosophy-adjacent. But there was never enough of it. Not until college, when I could have whole classes on philosophy.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what the point is of studying literature and history apart from mining ideas (philosophy) from them. It’s a hard question. My inability to answer it was one big reason why I ended up just studying philosophy.

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C.S. Lewis suggests that the point of reading literature, at least, is to mine experiences:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, therefore I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. …

Historians, though, tend to eschew this sort of justification of their craft. I’ve heard them talk of “locating” the self in a larger temporal context (or of “busting myths” that misplace the self in some false context – the historian’s version of Lewis’s quip that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered”). I’ve not heard them talk much of “enlarging” the self through partaking in the experiences of others. This sort of aspiration, they regard as suspect. Whereas Lewis says, “My own eyes are not enough for me,” historians say, “I insist on setting the evidence in front of my own eyes” (which, in practice, amounts to setting just a few links of an unavoidably long and complex evidentiary chain in front of their own eyes).

But perhaps historians don’t generally say this. Perhaps I have been listening to unrepresentative historians. But I doubt it.

How to disqualify your textbook from the Christian college market

Ecuador, one goal; Peru, the last-placed team, two goals. The manner of the defeat left little to be hopeful about.

Due to other results, we’re still in third place. But we were similarly lofty at the beginning of the previous World Cup cycle. I’d say, we’re about to go into another tailspin.

It takes just one really poor game, and we’re in big trouble.

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No libertarian myself, I enjoy reading philosophy by libertarians and classical liberals (and by other fans of liberty-as-noninterference). These writers can be refreshingly plain-spoken. Jason Brennan is like this. So is Michael Huemer. (I assigned a chapter by Huemer when I lectured at Bethel a couple of months ago.) So, I was excited to read Brennan’s endorsement of Huemer’s new self-published book.

The best intro textbook ever, Brennan raves.

So, I gave the textbook a look.

It may be a good book. It may be a good textbook for a secular college. But it could never be used in a conservative Christian college. It has too many swear words, and the acknowledgments page includes this line:

I’d also like to thank … God, if He exists, for creating the universe; and Satan for not maliciously inserting many more errors into the text.

I’ll say this for Huemer: his writing is not obsequious; it doesn’t pander to anyone.

Except, maybe, to the agnostics and the Satanists.