by Michael Liss

What moves the American soul?

We love arguments, contests, and elections. Love the drama, the passion, the polarizing candidates, the fake piety, the rank partisanship, the heart-felt and often appallingly disingenuous editorials, and the heavy dose of moral relativism.

It’s that time again. Baseball Hall of Fame ballots for the class of 2018 had to be postmarked as of Sunday, December 31, 2017. The final results will be announced January 24, but the angst is well underway. This year, in particular, the garden-variety question of who, on performance, merits induction, has been largely dominated by the public evaluation of a generation of original sinners, the steroid boys.

It’s been more than a decade since the first retired PED’s user came on the ballot, but this year’s discussion was juiced (sorry about that) by Hall of Famer Joe Morgan’s November letter to every member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (the voters) essentially begging them not to admit tainted candidates.

Morgan is right to be concerned. In a manner that mirrors the chaos and distrust in our political system, the fans and the writers are gradually turning towards acceptance of behavior that was once considered disqualifying. They aren’t alone—institutions and people in positions of authority are doing it as well. The Commissioner’s Office itself has a bifurcated approach—significant punishment for present users, but a queasy truce with the past. Retired offenders are no longer persona non grata. Fox Sports hired former litigant/third baseman Alex Rodriguez as a color commentator last season, and, if there was resistance from the league, it was very hard to hear. Other ex-players have begun to drift back into the game, and their presence no longer is seen as controversial. That couldn’t have happened without at least a wink and a nod from the Commissioner’s Office.

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More Legal by the Minute, More
Difficult to Fire

photo of a rightist with gun, FB 2016,
pistol pointed right at camera
barrel practically screwing the lens
bright silver halo at the business end
the moment the flash went off:
………………………………. lightning! lead
dressed in camouflage he was
neat.beard.militarish. intending
to be a threat maybe pretending
to be a threat who knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
of course, the shadow knows
but that was then on the radio
and it was fiction in a way
but there he was in 2016
and probably still is a year later
more trumped up with a sense of reality tv on steroids
becoming more legal by the minute
and more difficult to fire
.
.
Jim Culleny
12/29/17

—the Shadow

.

by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask a question about skepticism. Enrique asks:

I get confused with the dream argument. It confuses me to read the argument of the dream because I see several interpretations. Do they refer to the dreams we all experience while sleeping? Or do they refer to a class of dreams that has nothing to do with our sleeping bodies?

Enrique goes on to note that philosophers like Barry Stroud seem to equivocate when they talk about this argument, saying both that the argument refers to ordinary dreams (that is, the ones we have while sleeping) and at the same time that ordinary dreams do not pose any particular skeptical problem (although "philosophical dreams" do). In either case it seems that the dreaming argument is not where the real action is.

I agree with Enrique that the dream argument does not seem to get at what is really driving the skeptical worry. It’s true that a lot of philosophers address that argument specifically, which makes it look more important than it is, but Stroud is right that that’s not the real issue. And indeed there are a number of perfectly good answers to the dreaming argument in the literature, none of which put to rest the skeptical problem as a whole. So I advise noting the historical importance of the argument, but not to take it (or its refutations) too seriously. But since understanding the skeptical dialectic is essential for understanding modern philosophy, let’s go past that particular formulation to say more about skepticism in general. (See also an earlier post on the subject.)

One way of making progress here is to distinguish different kinds or aspects of the Cartesian commitments driving the modern skeptical dialectic. First, of course, we know that traditional Cartesian metaphysics divides the world into mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), and we naturally think of the epistemological puzzles as following from that: if we are constituted as knowers by one sort of substance, how do we come to know about another sort of substance entirely? We are used to regarding our senses as delivering knowledge about the physical world, and indeed how could we not? But on Descartes’s mechanical conception of the physical body, our senses themselves are physical processes outside the mind, and thus on the other side of the metaphysical (and thus epistemological) gap. This is one thing making it look like dreaming is a good example: our purported sensory perception during the dream is itself (as it happens, and as we see when we wake up) a merely mental process – one which is, unfortunately for our knowledge, subjectively indistinguishable from “real” perception. But of course as we’ve noted this way of thinking of it leads to further puzzles.

We might do better to put the metaphysics to one side for now (but bring it back in at just the right time). The skeptical conclusion seems most dramatic when it concerns our knowledge of an “external world”, but its lasting significance has depended on considering it purely as an epistemological puzzle – that is, independently of what exactly it is that we seem both to know and (thanks to skeptical considerations) not to know. After all, the ancient skeptics didn’t need Descartes’s dualistic metaphysics to get their argument going, and they didn’t attack knowledge of the “external world” in particular.

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by Thomas Manuel

In both academia and in the minds of the general reading public, there seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to fiction. ‘Literary’ fiction is (infuriatingly) deemed to be more noteworthy than genre fiction, for example. Similarly, within the supercategory of genre fiction, there are some subtle, mystifying hierarchies. Most readers identify genres as sets of tropes, archetypes and milieus and know they’re employing purely subjective preferences when picking one set over another. But at the hands of many literary theorists, thought leaders and my mother, obscure aesthetic principles are deployed to bolster these hierarchies – such as the claim that science fiction is somehow more redeemable than fantasy fiction. This has gotten my one-horned, fire-breathing goat.

Dragons and faster-than-light travel

Science fiction possesses the heady connotations of science-ness, extrapolative thought experiments and futurism. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to lack any logical rules whatsoever and is thus relegated to the dustbin of escapism. Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, opened one of the show’s episodes with the claim that science fiction was the improbable made possible and fantasy was the impossible made probable. While framing the dichotomy as the improbable versus the impossible is cool, it’s also completely wrong. As China Miéville once wrote, “a certain generic common-sense… has allowed generations of readers and writers to treat… faster-than-light drives as science-fictional in a way that dragons are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that the former are no less impossible than the latter.”[i] Science fiction’s embrace of the language of science and technology makes it seem particularly rational and forward-thinking but on closer inspection, exceeding the claims of science – being irrational – is one of the key features of the genre. And that’s okay.

If this fact has to be elided over at all in the popular discourse, it’s because the benevolent dictatorship of our Silicon Valley saviours depends to a certain extent on the blurring between the idea of science and technology – that iPhones somehow take us closer to Mars. The reputation of technology as the only thing that still works in a nonsensical world that’s choking on itself is propped up by a lot of questionable assumptions. A similar situation exists with the industry of futurism. These institutions never seem to like science fiction for the complex philosophical and moral questions it raises about the world as it exists today. How strange.

While space is cool, it’s the philosophical and moral weight of science fiction that makes it such an affecting experience as a child. We definitely come for the robots but we stay for the humanity.

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Daan Roosegaarde. Gates of Light. Windvogel. Glowing Nature. 2017.

Installations by Studio Roosegaarde.

by Leanne Ogasawara

It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow.

But at least it was home, I thought.

My son would be going to the public elementary school I attended. He hardly spoke any English at all and couldn't read or write his own name, so he was a bit nervous on his first day. I decided to walk him over to make sure he found the room okay and didn't have any communication issues.

And it was the strangest thing. The suburban streets on the way to school were lined with big cars like the cars the secret service drives in the movies. Big and heavy-looking, they were everywhere. Wondering if something was happening, I asked in the office about it, but was told nothing special was happening that day. Then, later I told my mom about it only to be informed that no, those were the parents' cars of the kids being dropped off at school. She told me that everyone now in our neighborhood drove large minivans and SUVs. She hated the cars and hated what had become a big traffic jam every morning because of what she called "the drop off line."

So, let me get this straight, I thought. In the past twenty years, while people in Japan or Germany have been making use of light, fuel-efficient cars and public transportation, parents in the US started buying big cars to drive their kids to school everyday and wait in line while the car idle. Isn't that illegal? What about the bus?

Of all the things that I found myself unable to adjust to on my return, maybe the biggest shock of all was how little has changed in terms of the environment. Wait, let me rephrase that. people are talking about it a lot more. Maybe even talking in inverse proportion to lack of doing anything. A few things have gotten better but in general the consumption patterns are so much worse than I had even remembered. Today's hyper-consumerism: for me that is the bottom line.

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By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Democracy is supposed to be OK. It's supposed to reflect the will of the people.

So how come our government has just passed a big tax reform bill that most of us don't like?

How come we've got a president whose approval rating is totally meh?

A president who is not only the biggest asshole of all presidents ever, but also the biggest asshole among all current world leaders, the biggest asshole among all current business leaders, the biggest asshole among all rich New Yorkers, the biggest asshole among all assholes from Queens, the biggest asshole sitting on any gold toilet, and maybe the biggest asshole among all contemporary members of the human race extant, with the possible exception of Ted Cruz?

How come our government is filled with assholes of immense assholicity — the president, his staff (how about John Kelly?), his cabinet (how about Jeff Sessions?), Congress (how about Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan?), the Supreme Court (how about Clarence Thomas?), etcetera into an infinite totality of utter assholicity?

Aren't we as a nation supposed to be better than these assholes?

Maybe not.

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by Brooks Riley

by Akim Reinhardt

"….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart." -Donald Trump via Twitter (January 6, 2018)

Oh, that was good. But here's the thing. What exactly are his two greatest assets? Or yours? Or mine?

Trump's tweet is funny/horrifying not only because it's the exact opposite of correct, but because he has failed spectacularly at the most timeless and profound of human pursuits: to know oneself.

Socrates admonished us that the unexamined life is not worth living. But the world's most powerful man seems to live in open mockery of the ancient Greek. To gaze upon him is to be cast in the dark shimmer of a soul so thoroughly incapable of introspection that when Trump is on his deathbed, his "Rosebud" moment will be pronounced in tones of "Everyone says I'm the best," or "No one dies like I do," or "Bring me a diet Coke."

Thus, as if by sit-com writing formula, Trump's cavalier effort to engage the greatest of challenges was doomed to a banana peel slipup far more jaw dropping and painful than anything ever filmed by Buster Keaton or The Three Stooges. Give him the setup ("What are your two greatest assets?"), and he can't help but write the punch line.

For many of us, however, the grand quest for introspection is more tragedy than comedy, a tortured, unfinished novel rather than a furious tweet, the cruel taunting of unanswered questions as opposed to firm, imperial pronouncements from the White House bedroom as the Gorilla Channel booms in the background.

We are all quick to judge Donald Trump then, in part, because it seems so easy; his character is so achingly shallow, but also because it is always far safer to judge others.

To judge oneself is to play Russian Roulette with your spiritual essence. Because for every laudable attribute there is a bullet or two of dark secrets, disappointing shortcomings, and crippling fears.

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