The Importance of Being There

One of my favorite movies of all time is Being There—Jerzy Kosinsky’s great spoof with, for me, a serious message. Peter Sellers plays Chance the gardener, who morphs into Chauncey Gardiner through a mishearing. Tossed out of his employer’s home into a world he had never experienced, his encounter with it produce a series of misadventures that eventually have his name whispered as a potential presidential candidate. He simply advances through his new outside life by being there, doing his own innocent thing. But it’s the interpretations to his simplistic comments by the several other characters in the film that… Read More

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The Awesome Power of Speech (Part2)

In some earlier, never published work, I explored the work of Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher/sociologist, who has written extensively on the failure of modernity to bring forth the humanity of our species. I would add, rather, he was writing about flourishing or, better, the inability of modern humans to flourish. More explicitly, he developed his “Theory of Communicative Action” as a way to preserve the idea of the human as a rational creature and to avoid the domination he sees inherent in modernity. He, perhaps most among other living modern philosophers, has been concerned about creating a “rational” society,… Read More

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The Awesome Power of Speech (Part 1)

In this very uncertain time, when the future stability of our societal institutions is imperiled, it is very important to look at the power of speech. Speaking is an act, just like walking or any other movement of the body with some intended outcome. We usually are unaware that speech involves moving the lungs, vocal chords, tongue, and lips. The performative character of speech has been the focus of philosophers, sociologists, philosophers, and others for quite a while. For the readers who might want to go beyond what I note in this blog post, the writings of J. L. Austin… Read More

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Making Peace with Nature

Apocalypse Now is more than a movie title. The list of present dangers is long and getting longer: deserts spreading, wetlands lost, habitats shrinking, oceans overfished and choked with plastic, dying coral reefs, one million species at risk of extinction, record floods, extreme hurricanes, oil spills in sensitive areas of the oceans, air pollution killing nine million people a year, deadly wildfires, half the world living with severe water scarcity . . . . Scientists have been warning us about this for decades. Now we are beginning to hear from other quarters. In a recent speech on ‘The State of… Read More

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How Do We Know What’s the Right thing To Do

I have been puzzled ever since I was introduced to McGilchrist’s divided-brain-model as to what determined which hemisphere would dominate at any moment. That is a different question than asking which one was dominant over a long time. The second relates to the overall character of individual behaviors, as well as the general character of institutional behaviors, from the smallest, like families to the largest, that of societies as a whole. My own work echoes McGilchrist’s finding that modern, industrial societies act as if they have a collective left-brain that has dominates the cognitive domain. My path, however, to this… Read More

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A Plea for the Arts & Humanities

David Brooks wrote a very interesting oped piece the other day (Jan 28), commenting on the “sad, lonely, angry, and mean” state of the US society. It’s basically a plea for more humanities, especially art, in our lives. I don’t always agree with Brooks, but this piece is spot on. Additionally, he is following, very closely, the work of McGilchrist, although I doubt if he knows that. The article, in very different words and from a different platform, is pointing to the left-brain domination of our society, just as McGilchrist does. The problems he points to are the result of… Read More

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Free Speech Is More than a Libertarian Slogan

J. S. Mill may not have invented the idea of free speech, but his influential essay, On Liberty, certainly established it as a cornerstone of our political system. Here is the essence of his argument for protecting it: ..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as… Read More

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The Error of Explication

  The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book: by which I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature. The experience of understanding involves a shift from what seems initially chaotic or formless, to a coherent stable form or picture, a Gestalt – or from an existing Gestalt to a new and better one, that seems richer than the one it replaces. (Iain McGilchrist: The Matter with Things) One of the key differences between the two brain hemispheres, according to Iain McGilchrist is the… Read More

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Cleaning Up Messes

Neologisms, like polycrises, often appear to clarify what has been confusing and intractable, but are also often unnecessary and continue to obfuscate, not clarify. Certainly the world is facing the multiple crises, but the proper response is not to convene ever more scientists to produce ever more scientific truths or ever more engineers or economists to produce ever more fixes. All these crises have profound impacts on human beings and involve solutions that inexorably have ethical consequences. A couple of planners, Rittel and Webber, in a now classic paper, called these kind of problems, wicked problems, to distinguish them from… Read More

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Caveat Emptor

This is a short follow-up to the last blog post. Yesterday (1/6/2024), the NYTimes ran an article with this headline: “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024. The focus on “reality” is critical because reality shapes the outcome of our actions. The MAGA movement and its leader have been trying to re-create the realities that determine the way our lives will unfold. Two realities, but one much more important than the other. As I wrote, one is the natural world which operates according to a set of rules that have been in place… Read More

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