Melville on Religion

Offered without comment:

“As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, no matter how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.”

 Herman Melville, Moby Dick. (New York: Signet, 1980) 94, ch 17, “The Ramadan.”

Newspapers, Sports, and Healthy Societies

Everywhere I've lived I've subscribed to the local newspaper. I do so because I think it's important to be informed about what's happening in my community, and because buying the local paper is like a voluntary tax you pay when you love democracy.  It funds investigative reporting about local politics, which, while imperfect, is one of the keys to fighting corruption.

I have caught some of de Tocqueville's enthusiasm for the way journalism can pump the lifeblood of a free society.  Subscription to one's local paper is an act of patriotism.  It is a commonplace of contemporary life in the United States to say that our freedom is won and preserved by soldiers.  But this is, at best, only partly true, and history shows that armed men can both help and hinder freedom.  Armies may be helpful, but there are other services that are more essential to freedom: lawyers, educators, and journalists. 

But my idealism concerning journalism contends with my cynicism.  Publishers of news are, after all, publishers; and publishers must pay their bills, too.  They've got to sell ads, which means they can't risk offending those who buy ads.  Right now we are in one of those times when there are a very few companies that own very many of the news outlets, and it's hard to imagine that doesn't affect both the slant of news stories told and the way those stories are selected and omitted in the first place.  And they've got to print what we want to buy. 

All this is a prelude to something else I have in mind to write over the next few days, about the relationship between sports and education, a question at least as old as Plato's Republic. I begin here by noting the role sports play in our news.  How much of television news is devoted to sports?  On any given day, a third of my local newspaper reports local and national and international sports stories. 

This raises several questions for me. Why does this hold such fascination for us?  And is our fascination with sports healthy?  

Since some of what I will say about sports will seem critical, let me point out that I'm not opposed to sports.  I'm a member of a society devoted to philosophy and sport, and I love outdoor recreation.  I swam for the varsity team in my high school; I played club ultimate in college; I encouraged my kids to play various sports like flag football, gymnastics, little league, and soccer throughout their youth; and I am now the faculty advisor for my college's martial arts club and I am a U-19 recreational league soccer coach in my city.  Sports are important; but that does not mean that all the attention we give to sports is well given. 

So, once again, I begin with noticing the attention our newspapers give to sports.  Plainly we need our journalists to attend to judges and legislators, to governors and police departments, because all of those are public offices endowed with public trust.  Journalists are one of the main ways we prevent the violation of that trust.  So what about sports?  Is the presence (we could even say the domination) of sporting news merely a distraction from the real work of journalism?  Is it a necessary evil to get us to buy the paper and to support the important democratic work of reporting? 

One could argue that we need newspapers to watch athletes and coaches and owners of athletic teams to ensure that their influence on society is not unjust.  But this cuts both ways: were it not for the attention we already give to sport, the influence of athletes, coaches, and owners would be minimal.  The fact that newspapers report so much about sport is the symptom; we ourselves, and our attention to sport are the cause.  It is not something called "sport" that is at issue here, nor the leaning of the journalists, but rather, the attention we ourselves pay it.  If newspapers are physicians of our civic life, then we are the patient; and the doctor can only do so much to make us healthy if we will not do our part, too.

A Lenten Meditation from Merold Westphal

“If Christianity is Platonism for the masses, scientific objectivity is Platonism for the enlightened elites of modernity.”

Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith. (New York: Fordham UP, 1998) p. 227

Hope And The Future: An Open Letter To The President

Dear President Obama,

I know you've got a lot on your mind right now, and I don't envy you the burdens of your office.  I pray for you often, asking God to give you the wisdom to make good decisions and the strength to carry them out.

I have two requests for you today.  The first is, please don't give up on hope.  In your first campaign you spoke about hope a lot, and I think you know that meant a lot to people everywhere.  We all want hope, especially hope that we feel we can believe in.  We will often settle for unreasonable hopes, but we prefer hopes that seem grounded in possibility rather than in wild fantasy. For a while there you sounded like you had both hope and reason for hope.  When I think about the office you occupy, I imagine there's a lot that works to rein hope in, to tame hope and to break it.  You start out with big ideals, and then everyone reminds you that limited resources will be made to seem even scarcer by partisan quarrels until there's nothing left to spend on dreams.  But let me tell you this: we need you to make lots of small decisions, but we also need some big dreams, some reasonable hopes.  We need someone who will climb the steps to the bully pulpit and preach a sermon that reminds us of "the better angels of our nature." Don't just make the little decisions; remind us of the great hopes that have lived in our nation.

The second request is related to the first: I'd like you to help us to nurture the reasonable hope that we can find new ways of making energy.  There are powerful sermons being preached about building more oil and tar sand pipelines so that the old ways can be maintained.  But those are sermons without hope, the sermons of a creed doomed to perish in fire and smoke of its own burning, the platitudes born of a faith in a limited and dwindling resource.  They are the cynical homilies of those who pass the collection plate and who think the worst thing they can lose is our regular tithing to the god of petroleum.

We need a reformation in that way of thinking.

Because national security is not just about defending ourselves with bullets and bombs, and it's not just about making sure we have enough oil.  In the long run, national security has to mean that we have taken good care of the land, so that it is still worth inhabiting.  That, in turn, means we have nurtured our hearts and minds and cultivated our virtue.  What, after all, does it profit a nation to gain the world and lose its soul?  We are a nation of innovators, not just custodians of the status quo.  We began as an experiment, and it is in experimentation and new thinking that our hope now lies.

We can begin by directing more funding to universities.  We need bright engineers who have the freedom and funds to investigate how to make more efficient solar and wind energy. 

We also need bright students in the humanities who will help us form the best policies to make sure we use our technology well.  After all, a democracy can live without engineers, but it cannot survive long without reporters, teachers, and lawyers.

We know that money spent on education pays a perpetual dividend to both the person educated and her whole community.  

We can also encourage the creation of new and important prizes.  Why should we not have more prizes like the Nobel Prizes?  And why shouldn't such a proud and wealthy nation fund some of those prizes?  You've got the ear of the world for a little while longer.  Use that opportunity well, and urge us to put our private funds into prizes for people who advance the causes that matter most to humanity: growing good food, creating and preserving clean water, protecting the species God told us to care for, healing the sick, liberating captives, and making us better producers and consumers of energy.

I am grateful for people who willingly take on the burdens of public office.  I don't imagine it is easy.  You remain in my prayers.

David

"Hit The Road, Philosophy"

My latest article, written with John Kaag, at Times Higher Education.  Here's a sample:

"If philosophy is, as the name suggests, about loving wisdom, then it shouldn’t be something that is practised by only an erudite few. The argument that wisdom is valuable for everyone, and the life spent pursuing it is itself a good life is not some sort of Pollyanna idealism, but a pragmatic hope that philosophical reflection (what academic and novelist David Foster Wallace simply called “choosing what to think about”) can and does give life meaning."

You can read it all here.

"Don't Be Afraid To Hire Someone Better Than You."

My latest article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about the best hiring advice I've ever received.

Minnesota Canvas

I just returned from teaching a monthlong tropical ecology class in Belize and Guatemala.  As I flew from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls, I saw this view of the farms below.  Farmers and engineers have made firm lines according to the compass points, dividing the land into neat checkerboard squares of farmland bordered by dirt roads.  Every section has its woodlot, a dark quadrilateral on a white snowdrifted landscape.  

Ignoring the lines laid down by us, the wind has painted over this right-angled landscape.  The snow and the soil show where the wind has steadily brushed across the state, patiently unmaking what we have done. 

The Place Where I Live - In Orion Magazine

Here is a short piece I wrote for Orion Magazine, along with a few of my photos from around Sioux Falls.  It will appear in the print edition later this year.