OK, so I've been absent for a bit - a month to be approximate. I've been thinking.
I've also been trying to coax seedlings and cuttings on my patio to show some signs of life, but the weather has not been nice to them. I swear they keep bending towards the door hoping I'll bring them inside until the weather starts acting its age.
And then there's the sparrows that built a nest in one of the hanging baskets by the back door and B declared it an avian OB ward and set up a cafeteria close by and had me buy meal worms and various seeds to put out. Yes, I said "meal worms". The guy at the pet store thought I had an aquarium. The birds thought it was great. I go out to yell at the squirrels and get scolded by a couple of ounces of feathered impatience. So I go inside and think some more - sometimes about badminton. And thinking is hard.
I subscribe to the London Review of Books because I'm a lazy thinker. I get smart people digesting even smarter people's thoughts. Here's a couple of excerpts just on thinkers thinking.
LRB - Vol. 13 No. 18 · 26 September 1991
Thinking big by Peter Campbell
Great ideas share skulls with foolish thoughts. Nonsense runs with greatness, like vermin in a zoo, and no intellectual pesticide can guarantee to kill it and leave truth alive. Common sense has a particularly bad track record as a check on what is possible. So Newton, who dabbled in alchemy …
LRB - Vol. 6 No. 17 · 20 September 1984
DIARY: A Thinker Thinks by Joseph Epstein
Every afternoon … Hannah Arendt used to set herself out on the couch in her living-room and, for an hour or so, do nothing but think … I find myself astonished at Hannah Arendt’s or anyone else’s ability to set aside a portion of the day for thinking, chiefly because of my own inability to go and do likewise. I see myself stretched out on the couch in my own living-room. I am on my back, shoes off, collar open, hands in my pockets or perhaps folded over my chest.
Dissolve and cut to the same room ten or even five minutes later, where we see a man of middle years snoring lightly, a faint smile upon his face. … The man, of course, is me. And this brief scenario is what I take to be an accurate prophecy of what is likely to happen if I were to attempt to think in a concentrated way on a single subject for more than a few minutes at a stretch.
I'm in good company. People long ago did thinking, often on the explicit instruction of other people, usually women, whom they put in temples to go into drug-induced trances and tell them what to think about.
There is in Greece, the ruins of a temple to Apollo at Delphi and the words of its seeress have come down to us as the fundamental thinking commandment, "Know thyself", and although interpreted by different cultures down through the ages, the central injunction is still one of humble introspection - thinking. And that question – Who am I? Who is this person trying to know itself? – is one we answer differently with each new year of our life experience, growing up through (or being stuck in) beliefs that we are our stomachs, our genitals, our brains, our bank accounts, our aches and pains and always, of course, our feelings.
I can't resist the aside here that that command for introspection probably sounded a lot milder to Greek warriors than Lysistrada's command to the men of the Peloppenese to put away their swords and stop making war or she and the womenfolk were going to stop making with the sex. Those Greeks were mightily concerned with identity - as fighters and lovers as well as thinkers.
And then I came across this last week from "The Man of the Moment Is 3,000 Years Old" by Daniel Mendelsohn in NY Times, May 24, 2025.
More than any other work from Greek antiquity, the Odyssey wrestles continually with the question of how we know who we are. Its wandering hero, who keeps concealing and altering his identity during his 10-year journey home, changing both the way he looks and the stories he tells about himself, must nonetheless prove that he is still himself once he returns … that paradox — one with which all of us wrestle as we age and change — is a true classic.
Who could be surprised, then, that the Odyssey is all around us right now? However strange the epic’s origins and settings, the world that it paints — with its anxieties about gender and power, exile and belonging, narrative and identity — is one we know well.
"The Odyssey is all around us right now." I think the command of the Oracle of Delphi is also very present. Who we are and what we stand for are the big issues today and those questions frame the moment now as they did for the generation that came of age in the 1930s. We would know ourselves in the presence of forces trying to tell us who we are and how to think. We know who we are in relation to news of the carnage inflicted on children in Gaza and Kiyv and Darfur even when we swipe away that news of each new atrocity. And closer to home, we know who we are in relation to the bullying and posturing of politicians in the US, even if we are awake to it only when checking grocery labels. We know ourselves in pride or shame.
And we aren't alone - we're social animals. Imagine being the only one of our species – almost imposible to think that thought, I know – and you wouldn't know much because so much of who we are is about how we are with others. So, on a general note – and generalizations often allow for more authentic appraisals of existential questions, especially of others, and with politics being so prevalent in our thoughts these days – I am going to make a big jump and divide our social world into competing frames of belief and label them liberal or conservative. After a lot of searching with this question in mind, I formulated the following chart:
Constrained (Conservative/Tragic/Right) Unconstrained (Liberal/Utopian/Left)
people need regulation to control weaknesses people are good, change laws for equality
low/minimal taxation high - tax the rich
private enterprise infrastructure state provided
personal resp. welfare complex systems from state
private schools education public facilities free
individual resp. social security plan with shared contributions
private & multi-payer health care state/single-payer insurance
punitive/privatized criminal justice restorative/diverse/social values
political agency war negotiation/regulated/Int'l agreements
Revolutions fail summary Nice theory - Wrong species
Then I found this commentary on a middle road by Michael Schermer of The Skeptic Society in his text The Believing Brain pp. 236-248. He distils a lot of my vague thoughts into succinct prose, beginning with the generalizations that occupants of each extreme position have of the other side.
View of other side
Conservatives are a bunch of Hummer-driving, meat-eating, gun-toting, small-government-promoting, tax-(evading), hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black&white-thinking, climatechange-denying, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally dogmatic blowhards.
Liberals are a bunch of hybrid-driving, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, whale-saving, sandal-wearing,
big-government-promoting, tax-increasing, bottled-water-drinking, flip-flopping, wishy-washy,
namby-pamby bedwetters.
"Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this the Realistic Vision.
I think most moderates … embrace a Realistic Vision of human nature. There are at least a dozen lines of evidence that converge to this conclusion."
The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.
The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.
The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40 to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament, personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are accounted for by genetics.
The failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the 20th century revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work.
The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The power of family ties and the depth of connectedness between blood relatives. Communities who have tried to break up the family and have children raised by others provides counter evidence to the claim that “it takes a village” to raise a child. As well, the continued practice of nepotism further reinforces the practice that “blood is thicker than water.”
The principle of reciprocal altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine”—is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return, even if what they receive is social status.
The principle of moralistic punishment—I’ll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours—is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but almost never give.
The almost universal nature of hierarchical social structures—egalitarianism only works (barely) among tiny bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property, and when a precious game animal is hunted, extensive rituals and religious ceremonies are required to insure equal sharing of the food.
The almost universal nature of aggression, violence, and dominance, particularly on the part of young males seeking resources, women, and especially status, and how status-seeking in particular explains so many heretofore unexplained phenomena, such as high risk taking, costly gifts, excessive generosity beyond one’s means, and especially attention seeking.
The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.
The almost universal desire of people to trade with one another, not for the selfless benefit of others or the society, but for the selfish benefit of one’s own kin and kind; it is an unintended consequence that trade establishes trust between strangers and lowers between-group enmity, as well as produces greater wealth for both trading partners and groups.
At the end, I return to Ulysses, often disguising himself, telling Cyclops "My name is 'NoMan," and after his 10-year odessey having to finally assert his identity to convince his faithful Penelope and scatter the suitors. The 19 C poet, Tennyson, gave to his characterization of Ulysses a disinclination for sedentary retirement without giving Penelope any space for an opinion. Here's misogynistic old Alfred: You can get the entire poem at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses but it's really just the last stanza that illustrates the restless hero.
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You can see why the poem is often recited at funeral eulogies. We would all like to think of ourselves - to assert our identity – as such a seeker and adventurer right to life's final moment. But I'm no better at thinking than I've ever been. Those rats in the mental zoo keep intruding on my lofty contemplations, and so I'll close with some thoughts on thinking by a very profound thinker on the nature of his countrymen. I could have chosen a Canadian, I know, but this is so timely and too good to pass up, and it reminds me that the crisis in our neighbouring nation has its own resistance fighters.
LRB - Vol. 28 No. 13 · 6 July 2006
"Haute Booboisie" by Wendy Lesser on Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
‘We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant – and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side,’ H.L. Mencken wrote of his fellow Americans. ‘We deafen the world with our whoops for liberty – and submit to laws that destroy our most sacred rights . . A few years later, after attending a national political convention dominated by ‘intellectual jellyfish’, he predicted that ‘on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’
Don't think it can't happen here.