John G. Messerly's Blog, page 33

Poems of Philip Appleman

My last post discussed the death of Philip Appleman. Here are a few of his short poems. (I love how they rhyme.)

God’s Grandeur from Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie.

“God will laugh at the trial of the innocent.” -Job, 9:23

When they hunger and thirst, and I send down a famine,
When they pray for the sun, and I drown them with rain,
And they beg me for reasons, my only reply is:
I never apologize, never explain.

When the Angel of Death is black wind around them
And children are dying in terrible pain,
Then they burn little candles in churches, but still
I never apologize, never explain.

When the Christians kill Jews, and Jews kill the Muslims,
And Muslims kill writers they think are profane,
They clamor for peace, or for reasons, at least,
But I never apologize, never explain.

When they wail about murder and torture and rape,
When unlucky Abel complains about Cain,
And they ask me just why I had planned it like this,
I never apologize, never explain.

Of course, if they’re smart, they can figure it out—
The best of all reasons is perfectly plain.
It’s because I just happen to like it this way—
So I never apologize, never explain.

“O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,” from Selected Poems (University of Arkansas).

“Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice—
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good—
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.

An excerpt from “The Skeletons of Dreams” from Darwin’s Ark (2009).

…Back home in his English garden,
Darwin paused in his pacing,
writing it down in italics
in the book at the back of his mind:
     When a species has vanished
     from the face of the earth,
     the same form never reappears…
So after our millions of years
of inventing a thumb and a cortex,
and after the long pain
of writing our clumsy epic,
we know we are mortal as mammoths,
we know the last lines of our poem.
And somewhere in curving space
beyond our constellations,
nebulae burn in their universal law:
nothing out there ever knew
that on one sky-blue planet
we dreamed that terrible dream.
Blazing along through black nothing
to nowhere at all, Mastodons of heaven,
the stars do not need our small ruin.

“GERTRUDE” ( Gertrude Appleman, 1901-1976)

God is all-knowing, all-present, and almighty. — A Catechism of Christian Doctrine

I wish that all the people
who peddle God
could watch my mother die:
could see the skin and
gristle weighing only
seventy-nine, every stubborn
pound of flesh a small
death.

I wish the people who peddle God
could see her young,
lovely in gardens and
beautiful in kitchens, and could watch
the hand of God slowly
twisting her knees and fingers
till they gnarled and knotted, settling in
for thirty years of pain.

I wish the people who peddle God
could see the lightning
of His cancer stabbing
her, that small frame
tensing at every shock,
her sweet contralto scratchy with
the Lord’s infection: Philip,
I want to die.

I wish I had them gathered round,
those preachers, popes, rabbis,
imams, priests – every
pious shill on God’s payroll – and I
would pull the sheets from my mother’s brittle body,
and they would fall on their knees at her bedside
to be forgiven all their faith.

Philip Appleman Has Died

I just discovered that Philip D. Appleman (1926 – 2020) died last year. He was an American poet and Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. I first became acquainted with him in graduate school when I read his edited collection, Darwin (Norton Critical Editions), a classic in the field. He was survived by Majorie, his wife of almost 67 years, but she died earlier this year.

I have written previously about his poetry and his work on the meaning of life. I also summarized his book on Darwin and the meaning of life here, here, and here. And I reprinted his poem about his mother’s death here. (It is so intelligent and passionate.) And below is an especially moving tribute to him.

In Memoriam: Philip Appleman, 1926-2020

Finally, here he is on

I’ll have a bit more about Appleman in my next post.

Our constitutional crisis is already here

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Robert Kagan has pointedly captured the current crisis in American Politics in his recent op-ed “Our constitutional crisis is already here.” He argues that our entire constitutional system could break down in the next few years. I recommend his essay wholeheartedly, and any intelligent well-informed thinker will recognize its truth.

Kagan is an American neoconservative[1][2]  a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century,[4][5][6] a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[7] He has degrees from Yale, Harvard, and a PhD in American history from American University in Washington, D.C.

For another chilling look at our dire situation, I suggest looking at “Trumpists Don’t Need Rallies Anymore,” an interview with Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works, a book that interrogates the strategies deployed by fascist regimes throughout history.

Finally, the New York Times Editorial board outlines similar concerns in “Jan. 6 Was Worse Than It Looked.”

I do hope Kagan, Stanley, and the members of the New York Times Editorial board are wrong but I’m nearly certain they are right. Fascism is likely coming to American as I have been warning about for many years on this blog. Below are a sampling of posts expressing my concerns:

American Authoritarianism, Coming 2017

American Totalitarianism

Authoritarianism in America

Articles About American Authoritarianism

The Washington Post: “…The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism …”

Trump: Corruption and Autocracy

 

Have Field Goal Kickers Improved?

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Last weekend Justin Tucker kicked the longest field goal in NFL history. He also claimed that the best NFL kickers regularly kick even longer ones in practice. This got me thinking about the evolution of NFL kicking and the phenomena of resistance to change.

Consider an example. I grew up in St. Louis and our NFL team then was the St. Louis (now Arizona) Cardinals. From 1963 to 1978 our kicker was Jim Bakken. Bakken was a 4-time pro-bowler and 2-time first-team all-pro, one of the best kickers of his era. ( You can see all his stats here.) Note that Bakken made only 63% of his field goals for his career from all distances; about 43% from 40-49 yards; and was 1 for 21 from 50 yards or more. (The kick he made was most likely a 51 yarder with a gale behind him!) Bakken also missed 19 extra points in his career in 553 attempts. (This is when an extra point was from 20 yards.) Compare this to the stats for kickers in the NFL last year.

As you can see today about 1/2 the kickers made over 90% of their field goals and almost all the rest made over 80%. Even in the 40-49 yard range, most kickers missed very few if any attempts. And in the last year that extra points were from 20 yards like Bakken kicked them, there were 1183 extra points attempts and 5 misses. They made 99.6%!

Today kickers are better for many reasons, but mostly because they kick the ball with their instep. Bakken, like most kickers of his era, kicked with his toe! When the first soccer-style kickers came along, they were viewed with suspicion. Who would kick a ball with their instep instead of their toe? Wow, that’s radical! That’s what I mean, resistance to change. Humans prefer stasis to dynamism; they are always stuck in the past.

Now to finish my story. In 1974 the St. Louis (football) Cardinals gave a tryout to a star soccer player from St. Louis University and my grade school named Pat Leahy. (Leahy was in my brother’s grade school class and I used to see him kicking a soccer ball on my school’s athletictic field.) Naturally, the Cardinals kept Bakken and cut Leahy—heck Leahy didn’t kick with his toe!

Leahy went on to become the kicker for the Jets from 1974 to 1991, finishing his career 3rd  at the time on the all-time scoring list in the NFL with 1470 points. (He has since been passed by multiple players.) Actually, Leahy wasn’t a great kicker by today’s standards, but he was a LOT better than Bakken. So why did the Cardinals chose a toe over a whole foot?

Well, kicking a football with your instep just seemed weird, whereas kicking inaccurately with your toe was normal. That’s just what we do. Why would you use your much wider whole foot? That just isn’t traditional.

That’s what I mean, resistance to change. It’s everywhere. And, on a serious note, we’ll only survive at all if we adapt and change.

(Note. This post originally appeared on February 12, 2014.)

Ted Kennedy’s Eulogy for his brother Robert

Life is mysterious, I’ll never understand more than a little of it, but I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve received more love than I deserved; learned a little; and found joy in helping others. There are many things I should have loved but didn’t; many things I should have learned but didn’t; many people I should have helped but wasn’t able to.

All this makes me think of Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother Robert. I have never heard it without being profoundly moved. The last lines are particularly beautiful. How I would love to be worthy of such words.

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; but be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.

“The Last Days” A Documentary About the Holocaust and Hungarian Jews

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I recently watched “The Last Days.” The documentary tells the stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust during the last years of World War II. The film focuses on the horrors of life in the Nazi concentration camps but also stresses the survivor’s optimism and desire to survive. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was remastered and re-released in 2021 by Netflix.[1]

I was deeply moved by the film and it brought forth many feelings and thoughts including:

a)how civilized life hangs on a narrow thread; b)how demagogues easily manipulate people; c) how lucky I am to live a comfortable life; d)how fortunate I am to have never experienced war; and mostly, e)how I’m never surprised by how easily people follow orders and inflict horrors on one each other because I’m familiar with the Millgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, The Monopoly Experiment, and HUMAN HISTORY! As Hegel put it in The Philosophy of History,

But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

I’m sure I’ll forget about the film soon and go about my life. But it served as a temporary reminder of both the fragility of civilization and the evil that lurks within us all. The only possible solution that I know of I’ve written about many times—we must use future technologies to augment, transform, and ultimately transcend human nature.

Finally here is a piece I wrote that is related to this topic.

The Fragility of Civilization

Summary of, “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t”

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“Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true.”

The above quote resonates with me; it comes from a new book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.[image error]

Here is a brief description from Goodreads,

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don’t.

But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true.

In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn … Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

Reflections -I believe that I am a scout. I suppose the combination of natural inclination and many years of education combined to make scouting (which we might otherwise call research) a habit for me. Well, an obsession actually. Any claim that I’m interested in sends me to research. I always preferred to know the truth—no matter how unsatisfying that truth was—to deceiving myself in order to satisfy some desire or believe what I wished to be true. I’m not sure exactly why this obsession with truth is such a part of me, and I recognize that even the most impartial scouts harbor some prejudices, but I’ve tried to transcend those prejudices as best I could using the scientific method’s emphasis on reason and evidence. This is the essence of critical thinking.

And I thank my many teachers, students, and friends who over the years have helped me along this road.

Should You Do Your Own Research?

The above is a humorous look at the mantra, “do your own research,” held by many anti-vaxxers, Q-Anoners, and conspiracy theorists of various stripes. Here is a more serious look at the issue:

Now, this doesn’t mean the experts are never wrong but regarding especially the natural sciences, the experts are exponentially more likely to be right than non-experts. Simply put watching a YouTube video is no substitute for a lifetime of study. In fact, in a half-hour video you can make a case for almost any idea, no matter how absurd.

Remember too that a 5-minute clip isn’t enough to reveal say the depth of, for example, Dr. Fauci’s knowledge of epidemiology/biology/chemistry/biochemistry/molecular biology/genetics/pandemics and more vs. the complete ignorance of the subject by his detractors. (I apologize for subjecting my readers to the person questioning Dr. Fauci in the clip above. Rand Paul is a horrific human being.) The expert understands the subject a thousand levels deep whereas the talking head spouts nonsense for some personal reason.

This all reminds me of a student years ago who thought the fact that the existence today of monkeys was some kind of disproof of biological evolution. First I pointed out that he was mistaken in his belief that humans descended from monkeys (we share a common ancestor with them.) I also pointed out that evolutionary biology is understood in great detail at the molecular level. Finally, I asked him to think about the reaction to his claim that the biology department at the university. Would one say to the other “Hey Joe, did you know that monkeys exist?” And the other would respond “I forgot about that so there goes 150 of biological research. I’m surprised no one thought of this before!”

Still I tried not to make fun of the student. I told him that I had been taken in by many absurd things before I developed my critical thinking skills. For example the ridiculous ideas of Erich von Daniken’s “ancient astronaut” books back in the early 1970s.

Undoubtedly, there is a lot more to say about critical thinking and I’ve written about it many times on this blog. But if you want to learn to think well a good path would embark on a demanding curriculum in the mathematical and natural sciences along with a few classes in critical thinking and symbolic logic in the philosophy department. I’m not saying this is the only way to do this but it is a proven way. Remember too that learning how to think well, while having its own rewards, is a difficult task.

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The inspiration for this post came from a post on a great blog “The Weekly Sift.”

For those interested, here is a sampling of some of the things I’ve written on critical thinking.

The Basics of Critical Thinking

Psychological Impediments to Good Thinking

The Basics of Critical Thinking Part 1: You Don’t Always Have A Right To Your Opinion

The Basics of Critical Thinking Part 2: Who Should I Believe?

The Basics of Critical Thinking Part 3: But I Just Believe!

The Basics of Critical Thinking Part 4: Deceptive Language

The Basics of Critical Thinking Part 5: More Crimes Against Logic

A Graph of Cognitive Biases

A make-or-break moment for our democracy

I would like to refer my readers to E.J. Dionne’s Washington Post oped today,
“A make-or-break moment for our democracy.” Dionne has long been considered one of the few bipartisan sages and honest men in Washington.

Must Christians Oppose Abortion?

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(The piece responds to the fanatics who want to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us; they are the American Taliban. And by the way, there is no fetal heartbeat at 6 weeks because there is no heart at 6 weeks. Note also that a 6-week old embryo is about the size of a grain of sand.)

Abortion continues to make political news, but a question rarely asked by politicians or other interlocutors is: what do professional ethicists think about abortion? If ethicists have reached a consensus about the morality or immorality of abortion, surely their conclusions should be important. And, as a professional ethicist myself, I can tell you that among ethicists it is exceedingly rare to find defenders of the view that abortion is murder. In fact, support for this anti-abortion position, to the extent it exists at all, comes almost exclusively from the small percentage of philosophers who are theists.  And even among theists, opposition to abortion is far from unanimous.

To support the claim that the vast majority of ethicists reject the pro-life position, consider the disclaimer that appears in the most celebrated anti-abortion piece in the philosophical ethics literature, Don Marquis’ “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” Marquis begins:

The view that abortion is, with rare exceptions, seriously immoral has received little support in the recent philosophical literature. No doubt most philosophers
affiliated with secular institutions of higher education believe that the anti-abortion position is either a symptom of irrational religious dogma or a conclusion generated by seriously confused philosophical argument.

Still, lacking good reasons or armed with weak ones, many will object that their moral beliefs derive from their Gods. To base your ethical views on Gods you would need to know: 1) if Gods exist; 2) if they are good; 3) if they issue good commands; 4) how to find the commands; and 5) the proper version and translation of the holy books issuing commands, or the right interpretation of the commands, or the legitimacy of a church authority issuing commands. Needless to say, it is hard, if not impossible, to know any of this.

Consider just the interpretation problem. When does a seemingly straightforward command from a holy book like, “thou shalt not kill,” apply? In self-defense? In war? Always? And to whom does it apply? To non-human animals? Intelligent aliens? Serial killers? All living things? The unborn? The brain-dead? Religious commands such as “don’t kill,” “honor thy parents,” and “don’t commit adultery” are ambiguous. Difficulties also arise if we hear voices commanding us, or if we accept an institution’s authority. Why trust the voices in our heads, or institutional authorities?

For the sake of argument though, let’s assume: that there are Gods; that you know the true one; that your God issues good commands; that you have access to those commands because you have found the right book or church, or had the right vision, or heard the right voices; and that you interpret and understand the command correctly—even if they came from a book that has been translated from one language to another over thousands of years, or from a long-ago revelation. It is almost impossible that you are correct about all this, but for the sake of the argument let’s say that you are. However, even in this case, most philosophers would argue that you can’t base ethics on your God.

To understand why you can’t base ethics on Gods consider the question: what is the relationship between the Gods and their commands? A classic formulation of this relationship is called the divine-command theory. According to divine command theory, things are right or wrong simply because the God’s command or forbid them. There is nothing more to morality than this. It’s like a parent who says to a child: it’s right because I say so. To see how this formulation of the relationship fails, consider a famous philosophical conundrum: “Are things right because the Gods command them, or do the Gods command them because they are right?”

If things are right simply because the Gods command them, then those commands are arbitrary. In that case, the Gods could have made their commandments backward! If divine fiat is enough to make something right, then the Gods could have commanded us to kill, lie, cheat, steal and commit adultery, and those behaviors would then be moral. But the Gods can’t make something right if it’s wrong. The Gods can’t make torturing children morally acceptable simply by divine decree, and that is the main reason why most Christian theologians reject divine command theory.

On the other hand, if the Gods command things because they are right, then there are reasons for the God’s commands. On this view, the Gods, in their infinite wisdom and benevolence, command things because they see certain commands as good for us. But if this is the case, then there is some standard, norm, or criteria by which good or bad are measured which is independent of the Gods. Thus all of us, religious and secular alike, should be looking for the reasons that certain behaviors should be condemned or praised. Even the thoughtful believer should engage in philosophical ethics.

So either the Gods commands are without reason and therefore arbitrary, or they are rational according to some standard. This standard—say that we would all be better off—is thus the reason we should be moral and that reason, not the Gods’ authority, is what makes something right or wrong. The same is true for a supposedly authoritative book. Something isn’t wrong simply because a book says so. There must be a reason that something is right or wrong, and if there isn’t, then the book has no moral authority on the matter.

At this point, the believer might object that the Gods have reasons for their commands, but we can’t know them. Yet if the ways of the Gods are really mysterious to us, what’s the point of religion? If you can’t know anything about the Gods or their commands, then why follow those commands, why have religion at all, why listen to the priest or preacher? If it’s all a mystery, we should remain silent or become mystics.

In response, the religious may say that, even though they don’t know the reason for their God’s commands, they must oppose abortion because of the inerrancy of their sacred scriptures or church tradition. They might say that since the Bible and their church oppose abortion, that’s good enough for them, despite what moral philosophers say. But in fact, neither church authority nor Christian scripture unequivocally opposes abortion.

As for scriptures, they don’t generally offer specific moral guidance. Moreover, most ancient scriptures survived as oral traditions before being written down; they have been translated multiple times; they are open to multiple interpretations; and they don’t discuss many contemporary moral issues. Furthermore, the issue of abortion doesn’t arise in the Christian scriptures except tangentially. There are a few Biblical passages quoted by conservatives to support the anti-abortion position, the most well-known is in Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” But, as anyone who has examined this passage knows, the sanctity of fetal life isn’t being discussed here. Rather, Jeremiah is asserting his authority as a prophet. This is a classic example of seeking support in holy books for a position you already hold.

Many other Biblical passages point to the more liberal view of abortion. Three times in the Bible (Genesis 38:24; Leviticus 21:9; Deuteronomy 22:20–21) the death penalty is recommended for women who have sex out-of-wedlock, even though killing the women would kill their fetuses. In Exodus 21 God prescribes death as the penalty for murder, whereas the penalty for causing a woman to miscarry is a fine. In the Old Testament, the fetus doesn’t seem to have personhood status, and the New Testament says nothing about abortion at all. There simply isn’t a strong scriptural tradition in Christianity against abortion.

There also is no strong church tradition against abortion. It is true that the Catholic Church has held for centuries that activities like contraception and abortion are immoral. Yet, while most pro-lifers don’t consider those distributing birth control to be murderers, the Catholic Church and others do take the extreme view that abortion is murder. Where does such a strong condemnation come from? The history of the Catholic view isn’t clear on the issue, but in the 13th century, the philosopher Thomas Aquinas argued that the soul enters the body when the zygote has a human shape. Gradually, other Christian theologians argued that the soul enters the body a few days after conception, although we don’t exactly know why they believed this. But, given what we now know about fetal development today, if the Catholic Church’s position remained consistent with the views of Aquinas, they should say that the soul doesn’t enter the zygote for at least a month or two after conception. (Note also that there really is no moment of conception.)

Thus the anti-abortion position doesn’t clearly follow from either scripture or church tradition. Instead what happens is that people already have moral views, and they then look to their religion for support. In other words, moral convictions aren’t usually derived from scripture or church tradition so much as superimposed on them. (For example, American Christians used the Bible to both support and oppose slavery.) But even if the pro-life position did follow from a religious tradition, that would only be relevant for religious believers. For the rest of us, and for many religious believers too, the best way to adjudicate our disputes without resorting to violence is to conscientiously examine the arguments for and against moral propositions by shining the light of reason upon them. Having done this the vast majority of ethicists have concluded that abortion isn’t generally morally problematic.

It also clearly follows that religious believers have no right to impose their views upon the rest of us. We live in a morally pluralistic society which, informed by the ethos of the Enlightenment, should reject theocracy. We should allow people to follow their conscience in moral matters—you can drink alcohol—as long as others aren’t harmed—you shouldn’t drink and drive. In the philosophy of law, this is known as the harm principle. Now if rational argumentation supported the view that a zygote is a full person, then we might have reason to outlaw abortion, inasmuch as abortion would harm another person. (I say might because the fact that something is a person doesn’t necessarily imply that’s it wrong to kill it, as defenders of war, self-defense, and capital punishment claim.)

But for now, the received view among ethicists is that the pro-life arguments fail, primarily because the fetus satisfies few if any of the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood. The impartial view, backed by contemporary biology and philosophical argumentation, is that a zygote is a potential person. That doesn’t mean it has no moral significance, but it does mean that it has less significance than an actual person. An acorn may become an oak tree, but an oak tree it is not. You may believe that your God puts souls into newly fertilized eggs, thereby granting them full personhood, but that is a religious belief that isn’t grounded in science or philosophical ethics.

As for American politics and abortion, no doubt much of the anti-abortion rhetoric in American society comes from a punitive, puritanical desire to punish people for having sex. Moreover, many are hypocritical on the issue, simultaneously opposing abortion as well as the only proven ways of reducing it—good sex education and readily available birth control.

As for many (if not most) politicians, their public opposition is hypocritical and self-interested. Generally, they don’t care about the issue—they care about the power and wealth derived from politics—but they feign concern by throwing red meat to their constituencies. They use the issue as a ploy to garner support from the unsuspecting. These politicians may be pro-birth, but they aren’t generally pro-life, as evidenced by their opposition to policies that would support the things that children need most after birth like education, health care, and economic opportunities.

But what politicians and many ordinary people clearly don’t care about is whether their fanatical anti-abortion position is based on convincing rational argumentation. And, according to most ethicists who have carefully examined the problem, it does not.

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For another excellent discussion of this issue I refer you to

A Dozen Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court