It’s as if people respond better to a welcoming - as opposed to punitive - environment: “New York City Libraries End Late Fees, and the Treasures Roll In”. I think something similar is going on with two local Humane Society locations. One is perpetually struggling while the other has people stopping in just for the hell of it. The employees at the former are notoriously grouchy, charge fees for everything, and their location has all the charm of a medieval dungeon; the latter has a friendly staff and an open, airy, bright place where you can interact with the animals.
What counts as success in the climate change crisis?
At 20:30 in this video, Charles Eisenstein talks about something that has also nagged me. He says that one of the problems with climate change discourse is the way it has been framed as a matter of survival. The point he is making is that survival isn’t our ultimate purpose. Not least because we’re all going to die. Our purpose, he says, is to live in service to and in gratitude for the gift of life.
I've kept a very inconsistent journal since 2006, beginning with my first Father's Day. I wish I had written more consistently, but I still managed to get a lot down.
After reading this post by Patrick Rhone (others have also talked about this but I can’t find it right now), I decided that I needed to print whatever I really wanted to keep. So I collected my journals, a few social media posts, and some other miscellaneous writing into roughly equal documents. Then I printed them and created four saddle-stitched books. I’ve left them in a pretty rough-and-ready state because I like the DIY look.
Wrapping up Spring Break
After a couple of intentionally uneventful days midweek, we hit some of our favorites local spots on Friday. On Saturday, we went to the Van Gogh digital projection exhibit at Newfield’s. It’s impressive technology and definitely a unique museum experience. Worth doing once, anyway. We also walked around much of the rest of the museum. As with the digital projection, you can tell they’re trying to do something different by mixing together eras and geographical regions and leaving places for people to write down their reactions.
Spring Break, thus far
This week has been Spring Break, which is why I haven’t posted much. We front-loaded the week with travel because the weather was predicted to be (and has turned out to be) pretty dismal. On Sunday we visited Madison, Indiana and, briefly, Clifty Falls State Park. Madison is a great little town with plenty of historic homes (like the Lanier Mansion), cool shops, and a riverfront park. Here I am along with two other guys with strollers waiting outside the shops.
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.
There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.
But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
Last night I was walking through Donaldson Woods, one of the few remaining stands of old-growth forest remaining in Indiana, and thought to myself, “What’s new with pantheism?”
So once I regained cell phone reception, I found this book by Mary Jane Rubenstein. Also, this video of her is well worth a few minutes of your time: “Why We Need Pantheism”.
From David Cain:
If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.
Hannah Arendt, as quoted by Samantha Rose Hill in her essay “Thinking is Dangerous”. The essay is part of a newly announced project on Hannah Arendt that includes events and a podcast.
I recommend Samantha Rose Hill’s Substack.
I also recommend Richard J. Bernstein’s book Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?
Rachel and I recently watched an excellent film about Arendt. (I came across an article challenging its historical accuracy so perhaps don’t wholly rely on it.)
Finally, to round this out, I’m including below some notes I made a few years ago on one of Arendt’s essays.
In “Truth and Politics” (pdf), Hannah Arendt discusses the vulnerability of facts. Facts are contingent; events may have happened otherwise. Unlike mathematical truth, facts are not axiomatic. If facts are suppressed or distorted, they may not be recoverable.
_Facts can be inconvenient: “Facts are beyond agreement and consent. … Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies.” Given this and the vulnerability of facts, political power is a particular danger. “The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed”. _
_Facts may be suppressed and forgotten over time, but modern technology makes a 1984-style memory hole difficult. More likely is the strategy of transforming facts into opinions. When the liar cannot make his lie stick, he “does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his ‘opinion,’ to which he claims his constitutional right.” _
Another way political power may defeat facts is through the use of “organized lying”. Because facts describe events that could have been otherwise, an equally plausible counter-narrative can be fashioned by political power. “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truthteller.”
_The consequence of such widespread substitution of lies for truth is that “the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed. … Consistent lying, metaphorically speaking, pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand.” _
Or, as Yeats wrote:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches.
That is a smart line.