Robespierre on religion as social glue

 One of the recurring ideas in these notes is the notion that religion has a basis in human nature — that it makes sense when you consider human evolution.

The historian Lynn Hunt, in an article in the New York Review of Books, said that 

Robespierre worried that religion was an essential element of the glue that holds societies together. She writes:

Robespierre viewed the campaign for de-Christianization in late 1793 with growing alarm and eventually denounced it. He then tried to inaugurate a Rousseau-style deistic alternative known as the Cult of the Supreme Being, whose festival he presided over in early June 1794.

The article is accompanied by an engraving illustrating the festival inaugurating the new state religion.

The article was a reminder that improvements to the social glue are not always lasting successes. Neither the new state religion nor Robespierre survived for long.

• Lynn Hunt, “I, the People,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXIX, No. 11, pp. 25-26. For other examples of notes on this theme, see “E.O. Wilson on religion,” June 12, 2022, and “Whitehead’s broad interests,” May 14, 2022.

Thinking is a craft

 I like to write, and when people me why, I usually reply that writing is just a species of thinking. I think at the point of a pen.

If there’s a better way to talk about writing I don’t know what it is.

I also think that writing is a craft. You can learn to use tools — words, illustrations and arguments — to improve the way you write. And, since writing is a way of thinking, that attention to tools and craftsmanship improves your thinking.

Here’s a line from Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare that argues that the most helpful way to talk about thinking is to talk of it as a craft:

What’s a better way to talk about vibrant habits of the mind? I propose that craft more accurately describes (and celebrates) thinking, whether in Shakespeare’s era or ours. Craft reminds us of the writer-in-process that Shakespeare was — a product of his practice, just as we can be.

Note that word “practice.” A musician must practice his instrument. A doctor must practice her medicine.

One of my uncles used to call me the “horizontal nephew,” the teenager who could be found lying on the couch on the back porch, reading a book or staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. I was just practicing.

• Sources: Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 25. 

Habits that shape a mind

 I’ve spent the last few days telling friends about Scott Newstok’s book How to Think like Shakespeare.

If you want to get to the heart of it, here’s a good place to start:

I’m suggesting that to think like Shakespeare, we need to consider the habits that shaped his mind, including practices as simple as transcribing quotations, or working with a tradition.

I love that phrase: “consider the habits that shaped his mind.” It intrigues me because I have been trying to figure out the forces that shaped my own mind.

We all start with what medieval scholars called the textus receptus, the received text, the book that is handed down to us. Those old scholars were talking about the Bible, of course, but I am talking about the big package that our culture hands down to us, from one generation to another. This book contains marvelous insights and horrific prejudices.

Those forces shape us. And people shape us — some who accept and interpret for us the insights of our culture and others who resist them and teach us to reject the poison. We have people — a parent or grandparent, a teacher a friend — whose habits of mind influence the way we approach problems and interesting questions.

Along the way, we develop our own habits of mind. Newstok points out how important those habits are, even those that are so simple we overlook them — something as simple as copying quotations into a notebook.

I’ve been doing that for years. And, as obtuse as I am about such things, even I can see that I’ve been shaped by the habit of keeping a notebook.

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to propose an experiment. Sit for an hour with a pencil and paper and make a list of the forces that shaped you. Just sit quietly for a while. See what comes up.

My guess is that it might be the most interesting hour of the week, far better than anything on the Internet or TV.

• Sources: The quotation is from Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 11. For my first note on this extraordinary book, see  “Thinking about the Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2022.

Marking the day: Roy Bedichek

 I love the writings of Roy Bedichek. It’s hard to explain the fascination to people who are not from Texas.

A while back, a friend and I were talking about Stanley Walker’s Uncle Ernest, an old cowman who, when he was old and broken down, shot himself. He didn’t want to be a burden to others.

My friend said, “Uncle Ernest may have been a West Texas cowboy but he seems Greek to me.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Bedichek was the same sort of fellow.

Texas is known for its egregious politicians whose moral sentiments are unhelpful, sanctimonious, platitudinous and often hypocritical. But there have been people who have looked at this vast, harsh and wonderful landscape with clearer eyes. These people observed, questioned and thought. 

Bedichek was like that.

J. Frank Dobie, a better-known writer who was perhaps Bedichek’s closest friend, would tell how Bedichek loved to camp. Bedichek bought a ’51 Dodge pickup to haul stuff around in, including camping gear. The gear included field guides for flora and birds.

Dobie said: “He always took along something to read as well as to consult; above all, he took along the most richly and variously stocked mind I have known.”

I wanted to get to know a man with such a mind. And so I began to read Bedichek, first his essays and then, wonderfully, his letters.

There is a difference between getting acquainted with someone and becoming familiar. I’ve read enough to be familiar. Sometimes, I go to the bookshelf to see what Mr. Bedichek had to say.

I’m marking his birthday, June 27, 1878, as a way to honor someone who influenced my thinking.

• Sources: The quotation comes from J. Frank Dobie, Out of the Old Rock; Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972, p. 121.

My essay on Bedichek is at https://www.hebertaylor.com/roy-bedichek.

For more on “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

A short note on grief

 Ajahn Chah, a Buddhist monk and teacher, used to say that when a glass falls and breaks, there is only one response:

“Of course.”

A glass is beautiful and fragile. That’s the nature of the glass, and so, in a sense, the glass you are drinking from and admiring is already broken, already on the road to the inevitable end.

Ajahn Chah enjoyed the glass while he could because it was finite and thus precious.

All material things end. All living things die.

Of course.

A bad concept in governance

One of Plato’s dialogues begins with an argument about what statesmanship is.

The philosophers start with the idea that governance is basically tending. Cowmen know how to tend cows. Shepherds know how to tend sheep. Statesmen learn how to the tend people.

The dialogue doesn’t go far until the philosophers agree that it’s a bad analogy.  Governance is not tending because you can’t treat people in the same way you treat cows, pigs and sheep. Human nature is too complex for that to work. The concept is simplistic.

That discussion came to mind when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade yesterday.

• Source: “The Statesman” is in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns; Princeton University Press, 1978.  

Thinking about The Progymnasmata

 One of the many wonders of Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare is his account of The Progymnasmata.

Newstok’s book is about thinking. He contends that thinking ought to be a significant part of education. You probably have guessed that I would agree.

The Progymnasmata was a textbook on rhetoric. We’d say it was for students in junior high and high school. It was compiled in the first century of the Common Era. Some of the exercises had been around for centuries.

Rhetoric was perhaps the art in ancient Greece. Life in a Greek polis must have been an extraordinary exercise in influence. Every student of classical Greek is struck by how often the word peitho occurs. The language itself seems to be about persuading others or being persuaded by them.

A polis — that is, a community — is not a collection of buildings. It’s a collection of people, and they are held together by trust. The art of persuading your neighbors was central to Greek life, and they called it “rhetoric.”

To thinkers like Aristotle, it seemed natural that human beings lived in communities. It also seemed natural that they would try to influence each other by persuasion, rather than coercion.

The Progymnasmata’s program for teaching rhetoric is in 14 steps. Students began by retelling fables. They ended by writing arguments in support of legislation.

In between, the students had to learn to write in the voice of other people, including mythological characters. Newstok includes the example of Niobe, who insulted the goddess Leto. Niobe bragged that she had 14 children, while the goddess had only two, Artemis and Apollo. In revenge, Artemis and Apollo, hunters with divine powers, declared open season on Niobe’s children. What would it have been like to have seen child after child die?

Professor Newstok’s point is that earlier generations learned to write from the point of view of others. That was the assignment. Young boys had to try to get into the character of a mature woman who’d lost children and try to find words for her.

Today, young writers are encouraged to write what they know and frequently are discouraged from trying anything else. And so we have men who are fearful of writing in the voice of a woman. And questions about what a person of one race can write about a person of another race are now explosive, even among people who agree that “race” is a conceptual mess.

Shakespeare, by endless practice, learned to “throw his soul” into the body of another person, in the lovely phrase of Elizabeth Montagu.

We admire his ability to empathize with his characters, to find words for women and men, young and old, people who are white and people who are not.

But we don’t think much about why he was able to do that, while we so often cannot.

You might think Professor Newstok’s book is about education. I’m pretty sure it’s primarily about thinking. If you like to think, find this book. It’s pure pleasure.

• Sources: Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020.

King James’s smartphone

 Gareth B. Matthews, a philosopher professor, used to argue that children are naturally good philosophers

Imagine that you are listening as I try to tell the story of King James of Bible fame to my 7-year-old neighbor.

King James, I say, liked the notion of being an Absolute Ruler. He claimed that everything in his kingdom was his.

At this point, the 7-year-old asks if King James had a smartphone.

Here the story ends and the explanations begin: how smartphones weren’t invented hundreds of years ago. The 7-year-old, asking questions, soon learns the horrifying fact that King James didn’t even have a car or a flushing toilet. He’d never been in an airplane or seen a baseball game. His claim to own everything is preposterous.

If you think this is a story about anachronism, you’re missing most of the fun.

There is a logical problem here. It’s with everything.

Suppose we assembled the world’s experts and tried to get an inventory of everything — everything in the universe. What would we count?

Matter, of course, because everything is made of it. But how would we account for social structures? Would we say that a measurable amount of matter was tied up in churches and religious ceremonies that really didn’t believe in the reality of matter? How would we explain families and courting couples, the ties that hold them? Would those things count or we just ignore them?

Would we list the concepts and theories that are part of the school curriculum, even knowing that the list will be obsolete by the end of the year? Will we list everything we know about smartphone technology, knowing that list will be obsolete by the end of the week?

Bertrand Russell pointed out the puzzle in 1903. We can examine parts of the universe. When the consider the “conception of the totality of things,” the whole enchilada, the idea seems to be inherently contradictory.

Today’s editorial page laments the overwhelming amount and quality of bad thinking in this country. Today’s page is similar to yesterday’s. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if we heeded Professor Matthews’s advice and let children learn to think.

• Source: Gareth B. Matthews: Philosophy & the Young Child; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Moral sentiments, instinctive emotions

 Alfred North Whitehead thought societies are held together with “instinctive emotions.” His idea is similar to E.O. Wilson’s theory of “moral sentiments.” Both ideas are in the tradition of British empiricist philosophy.

Wilson thought humans inherit moral sentiments, which are expressed individually in terms such as conscience, self-respect, empathy and remorse.

He thought it was human nature to make something of these sentiments. And so we use them to construct social codes involving such things as honor, patriotism, compassion and altruism.

It’s the glue that holds our societies together. Or more precisely, it’s the glue that keeps individuals from pursuing their own ends to the ruin of the group’s.

Here’s Whitehead, writing a generation earlier, with a similar idea:

My main thesis is that a social system is kept together by the blind force of instinctive actions, and of instinctive emotions clustered around habits and prejudices.

We have two expressions of the same idea. One version is in the language of a mathematician and logician, and the other is in the language of a biologist.

• Sources: The quote is from Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. It was originally a series of lectures, the Barbour-Page Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1927. I found it here:

http://www.anthonyflood.com/whiteheadsymbolism.htm

If you prefer to read on paper, Symbolism was published as a short book by Fordham University Press in 1985.

For a recent note on Wilson’s theory, see “E.O. Wilson on religion,” June 12, 2022.

Monk parakeets at home on the river

 You never know what you’ll see along Zarzamora Creek or along the other waterways. The other day, we saw four Monk parakeets on the San Antonio River near the old Lone Star Brewery.

These birds are natives of Patagonia, not Texas. Decades ago, their ancestors came as pets in cages. Some escaped. The fate of escaped pets is usually a sad one, but these birds did just fine in this environment.

I have trouble with the concept of “invasive species.” What’s simple and straightforward to most biologists seems like a philosophical swamp to me. The gorgeous Vermilion flycatcher extended its range from northern Mexico to Central Texas when Texans began build dams and making stock tanks and reservoirs after World War I. The Vermilion flycatcher feeds on the aquatic flies that hatch from still — as opposed to running — water. That seems like an extension of range, rather than invasion, to me. And if one species is suited to an environmental niche, does it really matter what accident brought it to the place where it thrives?

You see Monk parakeets around here, but I, at least, see them rarely. I’ve seen others at Benavides Park on the West Side.

Bees in the passionflowers

 Passionflowers have been blooming for a couple of months. The other day we watched a bee tromping aroundunder the peculiar anthers, which are shaped like Thor’s hammers. They’re yellow-green.

Those parts were dusting the bee’s back and wings. The purple passionflower has purple threads called corona filaments on top of the petals. The bee was abdomen deep in them. The bee appeared to be drinking from the center of the flower, which is a nectary.

Passiflora edulis had several blossoms. On this day, each had its bee. The nectary is at the base of the stem holding the pollen-trapping stigma, ovary and stamens. The nectary is protected by the operculum, a series of fibrous hairs that form something that looks a little like a cattle guard.

Passiflora was named for the Passion of Christ. It was a teaching tool for the 16^th century Spanish missionaries who saw in the corona the crown of thorns. The metaphor became more and more elaborate. The five petals and five sepals were the 10 faithful apostles, reminding us that Peter denied and Judas betrayed.

The first time I saw the vine I was puzzled, so I asked. 

The reply: “It’s Stinking Passion Flower.”

I thought “stinking” was a pejorative indicating this lovely, but exotic looking vine was just another invasive species. But Passiflora foetida is a native. If you’re puzzled by the fetid odor referred to in the scientific name, just crush a leaf or stem.

P. foetida traps insects in its bracts, which exude a sticky “glue” that contains digestive enzymes. The Botanical Society of America says it’s protocarnivorous.

Happy Juneteenth, ya'll

Juneteenth is the day slavery finally ended in the United States.

The main rebel army surrendered in Virginia in April 1865. It took a while to mop up the smaller rebel units. As a general rule, the Union Army worked from east to west. It took a couple of months for the army to get to Texas, which was a backwater of the war. For enslaved people, the nightmare of slavery didn’t end until the soldiers arrived.

On June 19, 1865, general orders were read proclaiming the end of slavery in Galveston. The news spread rapidly, setting off celebrations across Texas.

If there had been states farther west, further removed from the war’s center, slavery would have endured a bit longer. But Texas was the end of the line in those days. This is where the nightmare ended.

It’s true that other nightmares followed. But those nightmares, too, can be ended and will be one day.

Our strange attraction to utopias

 Arnold J. Toynbee is out of fashion as a historian, but he pointed out interesting features in the vast forces that shape civilizations.

For example, where do utopias come from? Why do people start daydreaming about perfect states, perfect societies? We get the model from Thomas More’s Utopia, but people were dreaming about ideal societies and states when Plato wrote The Republic. Thinkers as different as Karl Marx and St. Augustine have had versions of the ideal place.

Toynbee had a couple of interesting observations:

• When people start writing utopias, their civilization has stopped developing. The consideration of the ideal starts when people sense that the society is no longer on the way up. The rise has stopped. They are anxious about the fall.

• Almost all utopias see the ideal as a place where everything is in such perfect balance that everything is static. There’s no change. As Toynbee put it, “an invincibly stable equilibrium is the supreme social aim.” (Toynbee thought More’s ideal was the exception.)

I think the second point is especially interesting today — and it’s not every day that Congress conducts hearings on a former president’s attempt to overturn an election to stay in power. We don’t fear social change when we think the country and culture are on the way up. We fear change when we think everything’s on the way down.

• Source: Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. My aunt and uncle had all 12 volumes. I’ve read parts.

Talos, the face of the original sardonic grin

 Surely you’ve heard of the “sardonic grin.” Have you ever wondered where the expression comes from?

At the root is the Greek word for “Sardinian.” But the ancient authorities gave different accounts of how the Sardinians came to be known for the grin.

Procopius, the Byzantine historian, thought it was because the Sardinians — before Roman times — used an herb to put down elderly people who could no longer care for themselves. Oenanthe crocata, hemlock water-dropwort, can cause the muscles of the face to contract, producing the macabre grin.

I grew up among folks who feared lockjaw. I have heard witnesses describe agonizing cases of tetanus. Doctors call the sustained spasm of the facial muscles risus sardonicus.

But I like Robert Graves’s explanation. Graves retells the myth of a bronze servant with a bull’s head named Talos. He served King Minos of Crete, the symbol of Minoan civilization. The civilization fell to the Sardinians in the misty era of history.

In myth, Talos did his best to prevent the catastrophe. Since he was bronze, he threw himself into the fire until he glowed red. He then welcomed the invaders with a big grin and open arms — bear hugs for all.

You might say it was a warm welcome, if you said it sardonically. Merriam-Webster says that “sardonic” means “disdainfully or skeptically humorous: derisively mocking.” 

• Source: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1; Penguin Books, 1975.

William Benbow, pamphleteer

 I wish William Benbow were better known. He published one of the world’s strangest pamphlets in London on Jan. 21, 1832.

The title “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes” doesn’t offer much promise that the pamphlet would whip readers up into a frenzy. But it was the catalyst for movement that became so troublesome that Benbow was tried for sedition and imprisoned.

Before turning to journalism, Benbow was a nonconformist preacher. The language of his argument is religious. The idea is revolution.

Benbow called for a national holiday that wasn’t really a holiday. It was a general strike.

It was to be a holy month — not a holy day. During this break, the laboring classes would meet and legislate a new order.

Our holy day is established to establish plenty, to abolish want, to render all men equal! In our holy day we shall legislature for all mankind; the constitution drawn up during our holiday shall place every human being on the same footing. Equal rights, equal liberties, equal employment, equal toil, equal respect, equal share of production: this is the object of our holy day day — of our sacred day — of our festival.”

If that line about “equal share of production” sounds like a Marxist plot, remember that Benbow’s pamphlet was published in 1832 — 16 years before Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.

Benbow starts with the history of festivals among the ancient people of Israel. The Sabbath was a weekly day of rest. And every seven years was a Year of Release, what today’s scholars call a sabbatical, an entire year of rest, when even the land was rested. And then there was the jubilee, every seventh sabbatical year, which was a kind of reset of society. Debts were canceled. Slaves were freed. Servitude contracts expired.

That’s what Benbow had in mind.

We affirm that the state of society in this country is such, that as long as it continues, heart-rending inequality must continue, producing wretchedness, crime, and slavery; — plunging not a few, but the immense majority of the people into those circumstances.

He said the British ruling classes, by deliberating and planning together, had brought about the happiness of the few. Just imagine a national congress, using the Grand National Holiday, in which laboring classes would meet to devise a plan to bring happiness to the many.

Up to this point, Benbow has asked us to imagine a utopia. But he thought the idea was within reach.

Every man must prepare for it, and assist his neighbor in preparing for it.

Each worker, however poor, must put aside a week’s provisions. Workers committees in each district should lay up provisions to feed everyone for the other three weeks. The wealth of the church parishes belonged to the Lord and could be used to sustain the Lord’s people in a righteous cause.

And remember: The cattle upon a thousand hills are the Lord’s.

The line comes from the 50^th Psalm, and the idea was that everything — all the natural resources — belong to the Lord and could be used to sustain the Lord’s people in a righteous cause.

Benbow said the nominal owners of those cattle on the hills would see the justice of the biblical idea immediately. The rich man who had the cattle would be glad to donate them to support the people in a righteous cause — if a committee of 100 workers approached him and asked nicely. And, if the rich man said no, a committee of 1,000 workers could approach the rich man and …

You can see where this is going — at least the British ruling classes thought they could.

It took seven years for the movement to become a serious threat. When it did, Benbow was sent to prison for two years. He later went to Australia.

Computers have reset buttons because complex systems sometimes get gridlocked and fail. Human societies are even more complex. The idea that they, too, should come with a reset button is an idea that should come up once a generation.

A story of two brothers, Kleobis and Biton

 The ancient Greeks told a story that some people today find troubling. It’s the story of Kleobis and Biton, sons of the priestess of Hera at Argos.

Their mother was distressed when the oxen that were supposed to draw the sacred chariot to the temple didn’t show up. The two brothers got into the traces and pulled.

Their mother, deeply moved, suggested to the goddess that her sons deserved a reward. She added that it should be the best gift the goddess could give.

The boys, tired from the 5-mile trip, went to sleep in the temple and never woke up.

There are two ways to read the story.

We could read it with irony. We could blame the mother — we often do anyway — for asking for the wrong gift.

Or we could reject the complicated interpretation and accept the simple, but coherent, one staring you in the face. It’s a straightforward story if you take it at face value. Two brothers, after a heroic feat, went to sleep and didn’t’ wake up. Is there are better way to die?

The ancient Greeks had their share of fresh and original thinkers. We’re tempted, sometimes, to think we are just like them. We are not.

Many people in ancient Greece had views about the value of work that most Americans would find appalling. Most of us would find their thinking about gender roles, sexuality and slavery troubling.

They, in turn, would be unable to comprehend our reluctance to talk about death. All of us will die. That’s what being mortals, as opposed to gods, means.

Given that reality, it made sense to some thinkers to consider the options. While we don’t have a choice about whether we are going to die, we sometimes do have options about the manner in which we going to die.

Some are better than others.

On the creek: Silverleaf nightshade

 The old Texas cowmen hated Silverleaf nightshade. It was, they thought, an evil weed — prolific, hard to kill, with the danger or poisoning animals.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful plants in Texas.

It’s the combination of colors: the washed-out green of the foliage against the brilliant purple flowers with golden anthers. 

Solanum elaeagnifolium started to bloom in April and will continue into October.

The anthers are like little bananas. They open at pores at the tip, but only if they are vibrated at the right frequency. Given the right frequency — such as a large bee tromping around — pollen shoots out.

The petals on the purple flowers are fused.

The plant puts on a small fruit like a green to yellow cherry tomato. In the same genus, Solanum lycopersicum covers most cultivated tomatoes. But the nightshade is poisonous.

The undersides of the leaf are covered with fine hairs, which gives it the silvery appearance. The stems have prickles.

Solanine is a glycoalkaloid, used in drugs for cancer and herpes. It’s in a lot of the folk medicines of the Southwest. Trompillo, as it’s known here, is used for toothache and snakebite.

Solanaceae is the potato family.

On the creeks: Turk's cap and scorpions

 Henry David Thoreau’s journal reported that on Dec. 10, 1840, he found a strange track in the snow. He discovered an otter had been on the prowl during the night.

He followed the track, reconstructing the otter’s night in town, and wrote:

I cannot but smile at my own wealth, when I am thus reminded that every chink and cranny of nature is full to overflowing — that each instant is crowded full of great events.

Which reminds me that it’s been a while since there’s been a report from the creeks.

• The Turk’s caps have put out their little red flowers. I saw the first bloom on May 23, which is late for us. Malvaviscus arboreus is such a common shrub people don’t notice it. We’re on the northwestern edge of its range. You can find it south and east to Cuba and southern Mexico.

• Hummingbirds are into the Turk’s caps and red yucca. Most of the ones I’ve seen have been Black-chinned, Archilochus alexandri.

• Earlier this week, we watched a scorpion crawl across the trail at Confluence Park, where San Pedro Creek joins the San Antonio River. Texas has 18 species of scorpions, and I’m no expert. But this was a Striped bark scorpion, Centruroides vittatus. It was light tan, with two dark brown stripes down the back. Scorpions are arachnids. They catch insects, mostly, with their pinchers — the claws might remind you of a lobster’s — before delivering the sting.

E.O. Wilson on religion

 E.O. Wilson was a remarkable biologist because he tackled questions others don’t think about.

For example: What is religion? Where does it come from? And why do most human populations have some form of it? What purpose does it serve?

Such questions didn’t come up when I was in school. But Wilson took at a stab at the topic. Here’s the short version:

Religions are analogous to organisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, they must die. In each of these phases religions reflect the human organisms that nourish them. They express a primary rule of human existence: Whatever is necessary to sustain life is also ultimately biological.

Wilson was interested in biological competition. In some species, an individual will dominate within a group: he will get the lion’s share of the food and take whatever mate he wants. He passes his genes on because he is strong — and selfish.

But among eusocial animals such as ants and humans, the group is more important than the individual. A group of selfless team players can compete against a collection of great individual fighters who can’t cooperate — that is, stifle their individualism sufficiently to fight as a unit.

Wilson thought that religion came from that tension between what’s best for the individual and what’s best for the group. He thought that religions developed during the period when human beings were evolving in tribes. Religions were a kind of adhesive that kept individuals together as a group.

Human moral reasoning is still loaded with the freight of tribal biases. Moral questions often reduce to “Us” vs. “Them,” and “Us” is always morally right.

Wilson held that religion makes it easier for the individual to serve the group. We live better, as a group, when everyone follows the received religion, which is often a law believed to be divine, and thus not challenged.

• Source: The quotation is from Edward O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality,” April 1998.

Roe v. Wade and a just society

 John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, a landmark in political philosophy, introduces this definition:

In a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

A lot has been written since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked. But I keep coming back to Rawls’s sentence. Alito's argument would overturn a settled right in the interests of political bargaining, a play to the calculus of social interests.

Millions of people will see that as injustice. I wonder what, as a practical matter, it will mean when so many people see the U.S. Supreme Court as a power that dispenses injustice — a power to be resisted, rather than respected.

Marking the day: E.O. Wilson

 Edward O. Wilson was born on June 10, 1929 in Birmingham, Ala. He died this past winter, the day after Christmas. 

Apparently, I’m not quite adjusted to the idea. But I mention him a lot.

“Sooner or later in a conversation, I’ll mention the biologist E.O. Wilson.” That was the first sentence in my note “A biologist looks at the human mind,” Dec. 7, 2021. Other notes that mention Wilson:

• “The value of a running conversation,” Nov. 5, 2021

• “E.O. Wilson, a biologist who wrote about learning,” Dec. 28, 2021

• “What happens to hawks when the students are away?” Jan. 16, 2022

I’m marking his birthday as a way to honor someone who influenced my thinking. For more on “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

A young doctor reflects on his career

 When I was a young man, I had a friend who was a doctor. We were the same age, each just making his mark.

He was an excellent man, as good a husband, father, friend and citizen as he was a physician.

He was a faculty member at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, the state’s oldest public medical school. Historically, the medical school had an agreement with the state to treat poor patients. It made sense. The medical students needed to be trained. The only way for them to see a variety of cases was to see patients from all over the state.

The medical school provided care at rock-bottom prices. When the legislature met, the state paid the bills.

When I was a young reporter, I saw officials in rural counties in East Texas grapple with the problem of providing care to penniless people with cancer. Some of those county commissioners were good bulldozer operators but they could barely read. The only thing they knew to do with penniless cancer patients was to put them on a bus to Galveston. That’s just the way things worked until, one day, the business model collapsed.

The state wouldn’t pay. The medical branch, allegedly a state institution that got surprisingly little income from the state, declined to accept patients who were uninsured and couldn’t pay.

Kicking poor people who have cancer out on the street was, at one time, a novel idea. There were protests. People said some cutting things about greed.

My friend the young doctor smiled wanly and reflected on the trajectory of his career: valedictorian in high school, National Merit Scholar, dean’s list in college, medical school. As a kid, he’d always done whatever adults told him kids should do, and then he woke up to find he’d suddenly been transformed into a greedy, grasping parasite on society.

My friend got into medicine not to help people. He had some abilities that most of us simply don’t have. He felt an obligation to use that talent.

He was a good man in a bad system.

Yesterday’s note was about how an economist, Walton H. Hamilton, had warned 90 years ago about the problems of choosing to operate medicine on a business model. His warnings were ignored. He was called a socialist and communist.

Some leading doctors of that day said that physicians could be trusted to put profit out of their minds when prescribing expensive procedures. And doctors certainly wouldn’t consider profit when prescribing drugs such as opiates. People who imagined there could be a problem with that in this country were just naïve, they said.

You could, given today’s crisis, choke on the irony.

But that’s not the point of this note. The point is that we are still pretending, after 90 years, that the jury is still out on the idea — the concept that a business model is the best way to promote good medicine in this country.

The verdict was in long ago.

An economist looks at the physician's role

 Walton H. Hamilton, an economist, wrote an essay on the future of medicine. He tried to get at the question of where the physician fits in economically into modern society. 

Hamilton painted a picture of what private practices were like around 1900. Doctors charged according to what individuals could pay. Medicine was seen as a public service, and doctors frequently had to pinch pennies to survive.

Then medicine became a business, and it soon became a good business. However, Hamilton’s view was that it couldn’t possibly be a rational business because the average layman simply doesn’t know enough to make an informed choice. He can’t really shop for the best care.

And, if medicine is a business, it has to acknowledge that it’s going to have competitors in the free marketplace. It must recognize that some people will believe that crystals, spells and prayers should have at least equal standing with insulin, diagnostic tests and surgical procedures.

If medicine is a business, it needs to get over the notion that it can regulate its competitors out of business.

Hamilton concluded that the business model was wrong-headed and poisonous. He said we needed a national health service, similar to public education. The service must be publicly funded and mandatory — no opt outs.

His article was published in 1932.

• Source: Hamilton’s essay was a dissenting view in Medical Care for the American People, the majority report of the Committee on American Medicine. The report was published by the University of Chicago in 1932.

Human nature and the idea of 'enough'

 If you ask people to improve a piece of writing, almost everyone will add to it.

When psychologists began to study why that’s so, they found that the impulse to add is not conscious, which suggests that it’s built in. People rarely think about subtracting.

I spent my working life as a newspaper editor, leaning on the delete key.

What’s better than an article that gives you a clear and accurate idea that takes 5 minutes to read? One that gives the same clear and accurate idea in 3 minutes. If your time is valuable, the shorter version is better.

If someone conveys a clear and accurate idea to you in 300 words, that’s enough. Adding another 200 words of blather doesn’t help.

Michelle Nijhuis has an article in The New York Review of Books that asks “Must We Grow?” The article looks at two books that question whether human communities must grow until we overwhelm the environment.

The article gives a good sense of that impulse to add, to increase and to grow. I am fascinated by cases where our instinct tells us one thing and our reason tells us something else. The moral dilemma, in a nutshell.

One of the most interesting notes in the article was about the research of Stephanie Preston, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Her studies “show that both kangaroo rats and humans respond to stress by hoarding.”

• Source: Michelle Nijhuis, “Must We Grow?”; The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2022, Vol. LXIX, No. 10, pp. 12-14. She reviews two books: Leidy Klotz’s Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less and J.B. MacKinnon’s The Day the World Stops Shopping.

Russell's 'In Praise of Idleness'

 Bertrand Russell thought the world would be a better place with a 20-hour workweek. In his essay “In Praise of Idleness,” he wrote:

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very modest amount of sensible organization.

The essay contains a hypothetical case. Imagine that a factory produces enough pins for the world with all employees working eight-hour shifts. A new invention makes the process twice as efficient. Pins are cheap. Undercutting a competitor’s price won’t affect buying patterns. The world needs only so many pins.

You know what corporate managers would do in such a case. They would lay off half the workers. The shareholders would pocket profits. The managers would enjoy bonuses.

But, as Russell points out, there’s an equally logical alternative. The managers could simply reduce the amount of work required to earn a salary.

The reason we don’t do that is because most of us think that work is good for people. And if a little work is good, a lot is even better.

The corporate owners of the pin factory, for example, would argue that 40 hours of work is good morally for the workers. That’s not true. Perhaps the owners inherited their shares of the factory and have never actually worked themselves. 

Russell defined work as moving matter about. As he put it, work is not inherently good. A certain amount of it is necessary for us to survive. But it “is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.”

Russell was a logician, and he objected to a logical problem with the popular belief. Production and consumerism are two sides of the same coin. They are logically linked, and cannot be unlinked without contradiction. If you believe it’s good to produce twice as much as you need, you must also believe it’s good to consume twice as much as you need.

Of course, we don’t believe that. There are many obvious problems with consuming twice as much as much as you need, whether we’re talking about beer, food or hydrocarbons.

But we persist in believing only half of our logically connected story. We believe overproduction is heroic while overconsumption is not.

It’s the story we heard growing up and cling to with both fists. But it can’t possibly be true.

A small problem in the philosophy of art

 Yesterday’s note was about G.K. Chesterton, a writer I shouldn’t like but do. I also run into writers and artists I should like but don’t.

That happens a lot to me. It’s a puzzle I can’t answer, but I also can’t ignore.

You can see what I’m getting at if you consider an ancient idea in the philosophy of art. It’s the idea that good human beings create good art and bad human beings create bad art.

Plato pitched a version of that theory.

It works for me when I think of the German composer Richard Wagner. Before I knew anything about him, I disliked his music, which struck me as bombastic, overwrought and long. When I found out what an unpleasant human being he was, my initial reaction — my prejudice against him — seemed just.

Of course there's no justice in that judgment at all. It was just a smug, ugly thing.

Fortunately, my smugness has limits. Wagner is the only case I can think of where I’m tempted to conflate the character of the artist with the quality of the art.

The other day I listened to “A Song Before Sunrise,” one of the many beautiful pieces of music written by the English composer Frederick Delius, another difficult, unpleasant man. I shouldn’t like a note of his music, but I do.

That’s just one aspect of the problem.

I should love the prose poems of Russell Edison. When I read his interviews, I think I’ve found a kindred spirit. But while I’m fascinated by what he has to say about prose poems, the prose poems he wrote just aren’t my cup of tea.

So there is the problem: There are writers (and artists) I should like but don’t. There are writers (and artists) I shouldn’t like but do.

I have no explanation.

Is contentment something you do?

 I should not like G.K. Chesterton but somehow I do.

This aphorism is an example of why I like him:

True contentment is a real, even an active virtue — not only affirmative but creative. It is the power of getting out of any situation all there is in it.

That seems right to me.

It’s the idea that if you are paying attention, you will find an awful lot that is interesting and worthwhile in the cosmos. If you are too distracted to notice, if you sleep through the wonders, of course you’ll be bored.

If you take contentment as an activity, something you do, you might be surprised at how much of it comes to you, ending up on your doorstep as a gift.

I know that’s not true for everyone. But it has been true for me, and I suspect it might be true for quite a few of us.

Percy Bridgman’s suicide note

 Percy Bridgman was one of the great minds America has produced. He won the Nobel Prize in physics and wrote some penetrating things about the logic and practice of science. But his suicide note was short:

It isn’t decent for society to make a man do this thing himself. Probably this is the last day I will be able to do it myself.

He was suffering from metastatic cancer. He had to kill himself with a gun because our society is not decent enough to allow us to do for humans what we routinely do for our dogs and cats: give them a humane way to die.

Yesterday’s note was about Bridgman’s contention that we have not absorbed the conceptual revolution that occurred in physics in the early 20^th century into the rest of our “enterprises of intelligence.” He thought that the revolution in our basic understanding of the way the universe works should prompt us to review our thinking on everything else, including ethics.

One obvious example: We haven’t been able to use our minds intelligently about humane ways to end life in the face of incurable disease and relentless suffering.

Notes on the conceptual revolution

 Percy W. Bridgman, a Harvard scientist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1946, talked about the advances in science in the early 20^th century as “the conceptual revolution.” This to me is one of the most haunting sentences ever written:

By far the most important consequences of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

I think he was write when he wrote these words in the 1950s and he’s still right. We haven’t found out to use our minds properly. A.N. Whitehead, another philosopher with a scientific inclination, held similar views.

With Einstein, Bohr and the gang, we had a fundamental change in our concept of the way the universe works. But that revolution in understanding hasn’t been absorbed in the way we think about everything else, including biology, anthropology, art and ethics.

For starters, we haven’t used our minds properly to account for how intelligence — including human intelligence — emerges from physical objects that we call brains. To use more common, but less helpful terms, we haven’t accounted for how consciousness emerges from matter.

Bridgman had an extraordinary intellect. He obviously was interested in ideas outside the field of physics. He played and listened to music.

He argued that it was time to get over the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, except as a way to organize academic departments in universities. The division was a bureaucratic convenience, not a serious way to think.

Bridgman pointed out that both the sciences and the humanities are (1) human enterprises and (2) enterprises of intelligence. We simply have to come to a better understanding of how to use our minds intelligently to get past the superficial differences.

Both activities — sciences and humanities — come from the same place, the same stuff, the same beings.

• Source: Bridgman’s remarks come from "Quo Vadis" in Daedalus, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Science and the Modern World View, Vol. 87, No. 1, Winter, 1958, pp. 85-93. For similar views by A.N. Whitehead, see “The notion of logical adequacy,” May 13, 2022.

What Darwin said about his memory

 One more note on Charles Darwin and then I promise to leave him alone for a while.

Here’s his description of his memory:

My memory is extensive, yet hazy; it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing, or on the other hand in favor of it; and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.

That passage delights me. It reminds me of Montaigne’s many complaints against his awful memory, bumbling, incompetent in every way except that it somehow produced the encyclopedic Essays.

My own memory is bewildering. As I’ve gotten old, I’m tempted to blame my shocking lapses on age. But the truth is that I have always had shocking lapses. I forgot things constantly as a child and as a young man.

I’m telling this story because I think it’s suggestive to writers. If you were thinking about an autobiographical essay, where would you begin? You might be tempted to think that the only way to start is with a description of your parents, your roots. But a description of your own memory — with attention to its strengths, weaknesses and quirks — might be interesting.

Darwin's attempt to know himself

 Charles Darwin called his autobiography Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character.

It’s the kind of book or essay I wish everyone would write. Darwin wrote the book for his family. My father, turning 70, wrote a similar book for his sons.

“Know thyself,” the ancient sages advised. Few of us do. We can recall events in our lives, but we usually don’t look closely at the forces that shape us.

I think a lot of people don’t start on this project because they think it would take forever. Darwin wrote his story in a little more than two months.

One passage is worth the price of the book. In it, Darwin lists his assets and liabilities.

He’s no great wit, he says. But he is good at noticing things and then observing them closely.

Indeed. That ability to pay attention to overlooked things was his first virtue, of course. His comments remind me of Guy Davenport’s great essay “Finding,” which reads like scripture to those of us who think that paying attention is important.

G.K. Chesterton got the same point in an aphorism: “The world will never starve for wonder; only for want of wonder.”

• Note: This line of thought began with “Darwin’s way with a notebook, May 29, 2022. For more on Davenport’s essay, see “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.