I'm jumping the gun a bit with my last two dawn posts, Friday's This is us and this morning's. We're scheduled to discuss Carl Sagan next week. But I catch my reflections when I can, and I do think James's pragmatism is also a variety of anti-authoritarianism. We'll talk about it, sooner or later.
We are it, the vast and awesome universe. We are small creatures with capacious imagination and growing intellect and, unfortunately, residual primitive fears and hostilities we have to overcome before we can truly claim our largest cosmopolitan heritage as citizens of a cosmos. The brain may be wider than the sky but the heart of too many of us remains a few sizes too small.
So I should clarify the cosmic/humanist philosophy I was celebrating in that last post. We're not insignificantly minuscule by birth, but neither are we vested with importance by pedigree. We bear tremendous potential. That means we have it in us to do something on a cosmic scale. Or not. ”We are the custodians of life's meaning," so far as we can tell. That's quite a responsibility. It's not yet an achievement. "If we crave some cosmic purpose then let us find ourselves a worthy goal,” was Carl's anti-authoritarian instruction at the end of "A Universe Not Made For Us."
Do something, humanity, don't just (as WJ always said) "lie back." Don't rest on some falsely-imagined lineage of inherent essential grandiosity conferred by divine descent. "This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication." Respect. Don't emulate.
In A&P we're surveying 'isms tangential to atheism, some on my view salutary--humanism, naturalism, pragmatism--and others decidedly not--parochialism, racism, sexism, nationalism, geo-centrism, chauvinism.
The docile passivity of waiting for meaning and purpose and importance to rain down from heaven or some more proximal potentate is beneath us. That reeks of authoritarianism. We can do better. Or so we'll see.
Note that small but crucial pragmatic qualification: "Respect. Don't emulate." Pragmatists must respect the ways in which quietism (etc.) seem to work very well for some people, eliciting their highest ideals and good works. But AS pragmatists themselves, they reject that form of quietism.
ReplyDeleteIt's Thomas Merton's birthday. He might be a prime example of someone pragmatists respect but don't want to emulate...
Writers Almanac: Today is the birthday of Thomas Merton (books by this author), born in Prades, France (1915). His mother was an American and his father was from New Zealand. They were both artists and they met at an art school in Paris. Merton’s mother died of stomach cancer when he was six years old; ten years later his father died of a brain tumor.
Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938 while he was a student at Columbia University. He taught English for a while at St. Bonaventure College, but he continued studying Catholicism and the spiritualism of William Blake. On December 10, 1941, he quit his job and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky to begin his life as a Trappist monk. He continued studying and kept journals full of his questions and musings. His superior at the monastery, Father Abbot Dom Frederic Dunne, noticed his talent for writing and encouraged him to continue. He began by translating religious texts and writing biographies of the saints.
In 1961 Merton wrote, “It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt that I have to live with), but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will most probably die as one.” Over the course of his life Merton wrote more than 70 books, 2,000 poems, and numerous essays and lectures. He’s perhaps best known for his spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). It’s been compared to the Confessions of St. Augustine. He ends the book with the line Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: “Here ends the book, but not the searching.”
From The Seven Storey Mountain:
“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.”