Camus’s “The Plague”–A Tale for Our Times

I have just finished reading Albert Camus’s extraordinary book, The Plague (La Peste) as part of one of the courses I am taking at my learning-in-retirement “school.” Unfortunately, I cannot read it in his language, French, but have a masterful translation by Stuart Gilbert. I discovered a copy of the first US edition (1948) in our home library, still with a rather tattered dust jacket. Although I find that the book is complete understandable outside the flow of history, it is generally accepted that it is an allegory telling the tale of occupied France during World War II. The heroes… Read More

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Grave New World

Every two weeks, my wife and I go to a movie club on Sunday mornings where we get to see a film that is about to be released. We have seen a number of Oscar winners over the years. Most are fiction of some sort, but we do watch documentaries on occasions. Today was one of those occasions. And the film today deserves special treatment. Entitled, “Human Nature,” it tells the story of CRISPR, the agent that is being widely used to modify genes in all sorts of organisms, including human beings. As a cinematographic work, it is extremely well… Read More

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My New Book Is Now Available

Finally, my new book, The Right Way to Flourish: Reconnecting with the Real World, has arrived at booksellers. The best deal, right now, is at the publisher’s (Routledge) US website. It is available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon’s UK sites. It can be ordered from Amazon (US) with availability coming as soon as the have a supply of the books. The Right Way to Flourish combines my previous work on sustainabilty-as-flourishing with a remarkable model of the brain to open new paths toward a future where humans and the rest of the Planet will flourish. Here’s the jacket description:… Read More

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Sea Change or Just a Ripple

On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable made waves in the business press and the media in general with this press release. The key paragraph reads: Since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance. Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy – that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility. The full “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” is quoted below. Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard… Read More

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Pragmatism and Hope

I continue to read Rorty and have just discovered a critical link between pragmatism and hope that I missed when I ended my book, Flourishing, with a chapter on hope. At that point I was grappling with Andy Hoffman’s questions about the differences between optimism and hope. Hope can stand on its own feet, but becomes clearer when the connection to pragmatism is made. Let me start with a few lines from Rorty’s book, Philosophy and Social Hope: If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that it substitutes the notion of a better human future for the notions… Read More

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Richard Rorty and the Right-brain

I am reading some of Richard Rorty’s work this summer. I was moved to do this by a critically paper that examined his political program. The paper, by Joshua Forstenzer, is titled, “Something Has Cracked: Post-truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.” The paper in available online from the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s occasional papers. The title comes from an extract from Rorty’s 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, Forstenzer includes as a prefatory note. I have filled out the quote (underlined) to reflect the full impact of the original. Edward Luttwak for example, has suggested the fascism may… Read More

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Love and Care

A friend just sent me a link to a blog post discussing the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, described in the post as the “legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist.” I also subscribe to this blog, Brain Pickings, by Maria Popova, but I missed this one. Almost a lost opportunity because Nhat Hanh makes a marvelous connection between love and my use of “care.” I have walked quite gingerly in writing about love because its use is likely to be misunderstood by the largely technical/professional audience for my work. But after reading this blog, I’ll not be… Read More

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Literacy and Domination

I have been reading Leonard Shlain’s fascinating book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image. I wish I had encountered it before I had completed my now book. I have been referring to Iain McGilchrist for the last year or so as my primary source for the divided brain model, but Shlain has described the same dichotomy, using a completely different style, telling historic stories without adding any clinical data. I find his work just as compelling as McGilchrist’s. In this book, Shlain traces the many shifts between the two brain hemispheres that have occurred over… Read More

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Natural Fireworks

This photo was taken about an hour before we watched fireworks from our porch. It provided the real fire for the evening. The setting Moon is just visible in the upper left. We don’t get one as spectacular every night, but do have more than our share during the summer. Our cottage is on the western side of a roughly north-south peninsula, offering us a rare view of sunsets over a small piece of the Atlantic. Every year Freeport has a show that is visible from our house. The bursts come over the trees about halfway between the setting Moon… Read More

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The “I” of Impeachment

Our President is fond of using the word, “I.” It is important to all of us in the US and elsewhere to understand exactly what that “I” means. It comes in two flavors. The first is personal, pointing at and completely circumscribed by the speaker’s body. This form is created, sui generis. The second arises from the institutional status of the speaker and is constrained by the deontic (obligatory) powers of the particular institution: in Trump’s case, those incumbent on the President of the United States. These are to be found in the Constitution, laws, court rulings, and established traditions.… Read More

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