My son is back in Seattle with his mom after a week’s visit with me in Atlanta. It was quiet and uneventful. He’s almost eight, and this school break week was very different from last year, when we took the train to San Antonio and then on to New Orleans. Last year he needed more accompaniment, someone to keep him moving, someone to supply things to do. This year, not so much – he has a sense of what he wants to do even when he’s somewhere he doesn’t want to be. There is too much demand for video games, too much demand for television programs (although in his favor, he prefers documentaries), but there’s a growing sense of self-created desire that comes through in him.
Future Blockaded
Canadians are such a mild-mannered people that, if you bump into us, we will likely apologize. Not for ‘being in your way’ per se but simply because civility obliges us to. Indeed, we value courteous social relations to the point where we might not ‘say what needs to be said’ if it’s likely to cause even a smidgen of tension. You may call us conflict-avoidant. I prefer to say ‘Peace-Loving’ — but I recognize that ‘being polite’ might not be the ‘winning’ attitude when worldviews collide. Therefore, when our nation gets embroiled in any conflict, it shocks us to our very core.
Parlour games
There is a terrific essay from 1941 in Harper’s magazine, “Who Goes Nazi?”, by one Dorothy Thompson, that has been making the rounds recently. The idea is pretty simple and simply brilliant: Ms. Thompson assembles a hypothetical party in Manhattan and surveys the crowd and asks the titular question. The people are caricatures – my guess is if any of them were too carefully drawn there would be a libel suit – but you get the picture. It’s making the rounds these days because of the facile anti-Trump conflation of Trump and Hitler, which is a bit strong but anyway, it’s still a brilliant essay, especially when one thinks about the moment of publication – August 1941, Lend-Lease in full swing, isolationism dominating the American political landscape, Pearl Harbor still months ahead. As a historian, I prefer to see it in that light, as a whimsical thought piece with a dark twist. It’s how I like my fiction, for that matter, so as an experimental non-fiction piece, it’s natural that I’d be attracted to it.
My Philosophy: On what there is
In the European tradition, philosophy begins not with an agreed object of study, but with the introduction of a distinct method of thinking. In the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the standard causal explanation for any important event involves some reference to interference in human affairs by one or other divinity. Understanding the moods and methods of the gods was central to providing an explanation of why history unfolded in the way it did, and why the natural world was arranged in the way it was. What set the earliest philosophers apart from their predecessors was their desire to explain why things had happened and how they were currently arranged without recourse to the gods. To be a philosopher was to think differently: to study history and science (and other subjects) for alternate sources of explanation to the mythological tales that were prevalent in society.