What Happened to Them...

I was in the second grade in 1942, like these children at Weill Elementary in San Francisco. Like them, I enthusiastically repeated the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag each school day. But most of the kids in this photo by Dorothea Lange, taken in January 1942, were sent to prison a month later along with their parents. They were Californians, like me, but guilty of being descended from Japanese heritage. I wept when I saw the photo this week, but I didn't cry when several of my 2nd grade classmates disappeared in February 1942. I asked my parents where they had gone. Some were not only my friends, but the children of people my parents knew well. We often worked during the season helping pick strawberries and other crops grown by those families on the then-fertile agricultural land in the Palos Verdes hills above my hometown of San Pedro, south of Los Angeles.

So I was mystified when my mother refused to say where my friends had gone. Or even to speak of them or their families again during the war. I didn't learn until late in 1945 that the Japanese-Americans in California had been held in concentration camps near Bakersfield and many other places to the east. Decades later I would have a colleague--a philosophy professor like me--who was born in Oklahoma, where his California-born parents--third generation Americans--had been incarcerated.

I never understood, let alone forgave, my parents' abandoning any fellow-feeling for their friends: they never said they were sorry or regretted the criminal U.S. policy of the time.

Faced once again with this experience, I weep...

 

 

WHAT IS POLITICS?

A great many of our words for our common lives come down to us from the ancient Greeks, specifically the people and politicians of Athens from approximately the 7th to the 3rd c. BCE. But most of our American founders idealized the ancient Romans, especially the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE). The connection here is that the ancient Romans also idealized the Athenian city and its culture.

So we use the Greek word for "city"--polis--as the root of "politics," "political," and even "politician." One implication is that you can't have politics without living in a city, that is, living amongst other people. For Athenians, the real city was the fortified hilltop called the "Acropolis" or "Upper city." That's still the most recognizable feature of the contemporary Athens, especially it's temple dedicated to the eponymous Athena.

The free citizens of Athens were the politeia: in English the "polity," also "community," and "society." It's only as members of our society that we have rights and duties. Despite conventional usage, "rights" are not natural or in some other way independent of society: rights are conferred and guaranteed only by the laws and regulations of society.

Laws and regulations have to be created and maintained by the people of any society: by the "public" or, more properly, by our representatives in government . The Athenians also invented a form of representative government: democracy, which means "government by the people." In order for representatives of the people to form and maintain a government, they have to engage in politics. That is, they have to consider not only the needs but the competing interests of the citizens.

So politics is, at its best, settling differences and negotiating agreements. Life, especially human life, cannot exist without conflict. This is true at every level, from personal relationships to entire societies.

Years ago, while cycling in France, I stood one day atop the fortified tower on a mesa above the town of Foix, on the Ariege River at the foot of the Pyrenees. Such fortifications--incorrectly called "castles"--are characteristic of every ancient city, whether still standing or unearthed by archeological excavation. They are monuments to the actions of attacking and fending off other people. It occurred to me then to think that no activity has occupied more of human history than carrying rocks! We have forever been building forts to defend against attacks by others like ourselves. Why?

We have warfare when politics fails. Combat is evidence of the failure to settle our differences: to negotiate agreements over our conflicts. It follows that the aim of politics--as of life itself--is not to eliminate conflict. The aim of politics is to achieve agreement on ways to move on with our lives in the face of differences. Politics is thus the most important of human activities. It is central to our lives and our well-being, and also to our continued existence in society.

In a sense then, we don't "go into" politics: we are all always immersed in political forms of life: work as much as society, relationships as much as family. Life is marked by conflict; success in life is marked by achieving agreement about our differences, by settling our conflicts as fairly as can be, knowing that we'll never run out of them...

The Same River

You may have heard of Russian physician and playwright Anton Chekov [1860-1904]. I was recently reminded that, after years as a village doctor, he described the human condition "as a dislike of life strangely combined with fear of death."

We all understand fearing death: we know we're going to die, but don't want to give up our lives. But what is there to dislike about life? The brief answer is: change.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (then in Persia--which we call Iran--now in Selchuk, southwestern Turkey), ca. 540BCE - 480BCE, came to be called "the obscure" because, while was said to have written a single long work, only a few sentences quoted by other writers survive. Among them:

"Nature loves to hide."
"Everything originates in conflict."
"Actions reveal character."

The single greatest metaphor in human history is also attributed to Heraclitus: "You cannot step into the same river twice." Heraclitus was rightly also known as the "philosopher of change."

The sense of Heraclitus' pronouncement turns on the meanings of "same." It seems easy to grasp "same" and "different," until you examine them. Then it becomes clear that we have to overlook a lot of differences say something is the same, just as we have to select some details that identify anything as different.

Am I the same as yesterday? Are you? Not if I focus on details: hair growth, skin cells, metabolism, etc. I'm still the same only if I focus on larger features: facial shape, biography, and so on. It's only in general that I'm the same from day to day. We speak of ourselves and others as "persons."

But what is a "person." The word persona means "mask" in Latin, so a "person" was originally a character in a play. You've heard of "role playing?" That's what we're all doing in our lives. We emerge with basic traits, but unformed, and learn to play a part in the world and around the people amongst whom we find ourselves. Of course, we take on additional parts as we age, and shed some, but we cling to many features of our early selves. It's mostly these qualities that others come to identify us with.

So the person I am is a function of memory, both my own and those of my friends and acquaintances. This is where the issue of change emerges: my persona is anchored in my past and letting go of any part of it seems like a loss. A sad, literal form of this loss occurs with dementia; as the sufferer's memory--and language--fail, they become "no longer the person we knew."

But the historical or symbolic loss of my past happens daily and inevitably: things change. And so it happens that the aging and the old exhibit the regret and rage and resistance everyone jokes about but which also produce so much suffering. People in my age group (I'm 83) exhibit Chekov's "dislike of life" yet still cling to it desperately, perhaps expending enormous sums to stave it off medically. It's sad, and exasperating.

But there's a solution: embrace change! I do it. So can you...

EVENT HORIZON

EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE

We attended a lecture this week by Dr Feryat Ozel, astrophysicist here at University of Arizona. She described the aims and tentative outcomes of a project she's been working on since she outlined it in her PhD dissertation some 20 years ago: the "Event Horizon Telescope."

What's an "event horizon" you wonder? It's the name of the imagined turbulence at the edge of a "black hole"--Google that for yourself--just before the light-and-mass forces drawn toward its massive gravitational field are pulled in and disappear. This "event" is predictable but not visible, except to radio telescopes tuned to a very short wavelength--1 meter--and focused on a source: the black hole imagined to be at the center of our galaxy called "Sagittarius A" (because it seems to be in that ancient Greek constellation).

Ozel remarked that the energy of this galactic black hole--if its radiation were visible--would be many times brighter than our own sun, even though it's 27,000 light years away from earth.

To detect the energy from the "event" at the edge of this black hole would require a radio telescope the SIZE of the earth! Ozel's solution: an array of telescopes distributed over the planet and precisely coordinated so that their recordings could be correlated for evidence of the event horizon 27,000 LY away.

After years of planning, construction, and coordination, the array of instruments--from the Arctic to the Antarctic, Arizona to Australia, Spain to Hawaii, Africa to South America--began to record data for 5 days in April 2017. Wow.

The weather was ideal all over the world! Now there's an event. The result was 3.5 PETABYTES of data! A "byte," you'll recall, is an 8-place binary set. A "petabyte" is one-thousand-billion bytes! The loads of hard drives filled hundreds of trucks and they all had to be transported here to Tucson. More wow.

When the analysis is complete, Ozel said, we'll know at least two things: that there really are black holes, and that we may have to revise our theory of gravity! Stay tuned...

LOSS AVERSION

I regard Daniel Kahneman's discovery of "loss aversion" to be one of the great insights of the 20th century. Some thirty years ago he and his fellow psychologist did the experiments that showed people prefer not to lose more than they wish to gain! That is, we will refuse to give up a dollar we have when told we will later be paid $5! Evidently the need or desire to retain something we now have is greater than the prospect of trading that possession for something more later.

This insight and others that were developed from it were instrumental in the creation of "behavioral economics." Indeed, Kahneman was eventually awarded the Nobel in Economics. The old model of "rational choice" has been superseded almost entirely by the "behavioral" model, in which economic choices are governed by my feelings, fears, wishes, and so on: all the "irrational" forces that characterize our temperaments and social situations.

I'm convinced loss aversion--in a variety of subtle forms--characterizes most of our decisions, especially the ones we find trapping us and others in limiting or destructive behaviors and forms of life. Like me you've likely noticed friends clinging to what they have rather than risking change. Because "risk" is the obverse of loss. When I got divorced some 40yrs ago I discovered that the obstacle to change is my having to admit that, if I change now, and the change is for the better, then I've "lost" all the time devoted to my earlier state. So we resist change because we have to face this imagined loss: all the time we've devoted to the condition we're in now.

That's why it so often requires a crisis to bring about any change, both personally and socially. The existing situation has to break down--as with a divorce or other disaster--so that we're forced to change. Of course, we can still regret it. Most of the time people cling to the remembered--or imagined--past rather than facing forward.

There's a really remarkable form of loss aversion that's been documented in a number of recent studies, and this one has even more significant political implications. It's been found that, when people have suffered for some time from inequality--discrimination, job loss, income disparity--they become less willing to support redistribution. It's as if, being a victim of policies or circumstances, I desire that others continue to suffer like me. Apparently we're averse even to losing our status as victims!

This is really something to think about...

SURVIVING DIVORCE

I learned to run in my mid-40s, at the urging of my tennis partner. Besides being my initiation into the life-changing experience of becoming an age group athlete, it proved life-saving as well. Through the period of my divorce in 1982 I increased my running to deal with feelings of despair.  Eventually I suffered a stress injury. I also I discovered that you can’t cry and run at the same time.

It was while rehabbing the injury, during the summer of 1983, that learned about a still-new sport. In July of that year I raced in my first triathlon. 

My oldest son surprised me by arriving that morning at the race venue. In the photo he took at mile 3 on the run I look like I might not survive the event. Many years later my mother was watching me race Ironman California, but left halfway through the marathon, saying to Jane, “I just can’t watch any more of this suffering.” And that was the race in which I won my age group!

Age groups are five-year periods: I started out in 45-49. By the time I entered 50-54—the exciting experience of “aging up,” in which you become among the youngest competitors—I had become competitive enough to imagine qualifying for Ironman.

Competition fostered confidence to address what I thought were my limitations. It’s irresistibly tempting in a crisis to cast yourself as a victim. So I had begun by telling friends, women in couples we’d known for years, that my wife had left. I stopped after the first two gave me essentially the same reply: “Good for her. I wish I’d done it years ago.”

So, in the crisis created by the end of my marriage, I began rethinking my life. I realized that we are not born with a self. 

We each have a number of stable traits, but we assemble a self from features and details in the lives around us. Many of these elements are inconsistent with one another, partly because the process is unconscious and partly because human behavior—like speech—is inherently ambiguous. 

The job of constructing a self—my picture of who I am—takes around 20 years, which is why we all find, no matter how long we live, that the years of college and after remain the most vivid of our lives.

My point, however, is that all the formative decisions, like marriage, are fit into that picture I’ve drawn; it becomes a template. Not only that: it serves as a model. Indeed, we both live out the picture and exempify it in unintentional ways.

It’s this unintentional teaching Philip Larkin satirizes in his poem This Be the Verse:

They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad.

They don’t mean to, but they do.

They give you all the faults they had,

Then add some extra just for you…

Man hands on misery to man.

It builds up like a coastal shelf.

So get out as quickly as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

CREATING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP

I was out raking my yard one day in May 1984. By this time my divorce was old news, and I’d been away that year teaching in London. I looked up at the approach of a friend and colleague walking home from the university. He stopped and said, “Hi John. Want to meet a woman?” “Sure,” I said.

So I went to his house on the weekend of Mother’s Day and was introduced to Jane. Walking up the drive I’d noticed a bumper sticker on her car for a congressional candidate in Georgia. Well, I thought, we’re politically compatible anyway. 

She herself had more than political appeal, with a brilliant smile and a PhD in counseling psychology from University of Georgia. These were only enhanced by my discovery, playing singles tennis on our first date, that she had a killer forehand.

Having both of us learned already that marriage causes divorce, we agreed never to repeat that mistake. We still celebrate that weekend in May as our anniversary.

It was when we decided to move in together that we began the work of establishing a partnership. We’ve since written the book on healthy relationships: Loving Well [available on Amazon].

Among our discoveries: we choose partners for qualities that we ourselves lack; but there’s an impulse to moralize differences; such moralizing interferes with affection; and loss of affection destroys intimacy.

“Moralizing” happens when I describe others’ behavior as “bad” or “wrong.” One of the things Jane found attractive in me is that my sense of time is quite elastic: I’m not inclined to be punctual, in sharp contrast to her preference always to be at least 15 minutes early. I score well to the left on the Myers-Briggs “P” scale.

But what begins as charming flexibility is likely later to be labeled “careless,” “insensitive,” or “never on time.” Resentment builds. Affection is lost. Children, of course, are acutely aware of these qualities in their parents and in their lives.

Reversing the consequences of moralizing is not easy, but the method is a simple one. Certainly, as Jane once observed, the simplest things are often the most difficult, Yet few things more worthwhile than restoring affection and increasing intimacy.

EXERCISE, EATING, & COMPETITION

When I taught triathlon training, I used to show my students a gel—a 1oz. foil packet containing 100cal of carbohydrate—to illustrate one of the ways you can provide for your nutrition during prolonged exercise. I ate a lot of these in the course of endurance races like Ironman, which take anywhere from eight to sixteen hours. At that level of effort you use up around 400-600 calories per hour, in addition to fluids and electrolytes.

So learning to eat is both an important technique and part of the fun of endurance racing. You can’t finish an Ironman until you learn to manage your nutrition.

But there’s an ingredient in this task that applies to daily life: your resting metabolic rate. RMR is a ratio of weight, height, and age. Metabolism—the rate at which I process my calorie intake—declines with age, as we all know. So it’s important to determine your RMR.

My weight is still 71kilos (155lbs), for example, but I’ve now shrunk to 1.75M (5’9”), and I’m 82, which equals a resting metabolic rate of approximately 1350cal. That’s how much it takes to stay comfortably alive each day. If I eat more than that minimum, the excess will be stored as fat—unless I use those extra calories in activity. Just waking up and walking or sitting around uses a few—very few.

Exercise uses more. My average 30m per day of cycling, which takes some two hours and change, consumes between 800 to 1600 calories. My club rides in Tucson all end at some coffee shop, where I can assure you I refuel. A popular slogan has it that a bicycle is a vehicle that “runs on apples and bananas.” To that list I’d add scones and cinnamon buns…

Nowadays it’s easy to track calories-used. My bike computer does it. So does my Apple watch. The whole matter of weight-gain does not deserve the attention lavished upon it. Once again, it’s a simple matter of eating no more calories than you use each day.

Emphasis upon “each day.” I no longer take any days off—except when dictated by travel—for I can no longer improve. Rest days once helped prepare for competition, for it’s only in competition that you have a full sense of the quality of your training.

So exercise has many benefits, but the biggest one is pleasure. I do it every day because I love it.

But it’s worth recalling Charles Schulz’ answer to the question why he made Charley Brown such a loser. “Well,” he said, winning is great, but it’s not funny.”

I still race, of course, but—while there are thousands in my age group in the state, there are only two of us now in Arizona still competing. Franz is two years younger though, so I’m looking forward to aging up…

SAILING & TEACHING

“I always go to sea as a sailor,” Melville (1819-1892) has his character Ishmael say, as his ship Pequod sets out toward its fatal encounter with Moby Dick. Melville uses this line to set up a joke about how men aboard ship do not observe the sixth rule of Pythagoras: “Abstain from beans.”

I want to use it, however, to compare sailing and teaching. Melville was 21 when he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, about the same age as Thoreau (1817-1862) when he asked permission to use a small parcel of Emerson’s and on the shore of Walden Pond to build himself a cottage. The men were both of an age, that is, close to that of my college students—and to ourselves at the time we have gathered here recollect—young and just setting out on their lives.

I use the verb deliberately: It’s not by chance that “course” describes both a plotted route and a study plan. Each day—each class or course—is open to possibility and invention, however much I’ve prepared, planned, and practiced…

I chanced one day to see an ad in the Stanford Magazine: a letter inquiring whether any alum might be interested serving as crew aboard a 45foot ketch, to sail from Toulon to Kotor. I wrote to the address, and a few months later stepped off the TGV from Paris to meet Alan Logan. The other crew member was a French psychiatrist named Phillipe.

Sailing depends upon the wind. The best wind runs before storms. So sailing affords intense moments, like trying alongside Phillipe to maintain my footing on the cabin sole at night, in a 30knot gale, halfway across the Gulf of Taranto, struggling to reef sections of mainsail, the wind tearing at the canvas, slippery with driving rain.

Sounds a lot more dramatic than opening the door to my classroom in the morning, but that’s only because the actions are different. The risks are the same.

They’re also the ones we ourselves faced as 20-year-olds undertaking to navigate lives and careers. There are few experiences more demanding—requiring both courage and preparation—than addressing an audience at that age, at least some of their minds open and inquisitive.

There’s a cynical description of college teaching as “the act of casting artificial pearls before real swine.” I reject that.

Consider the fact that Thoreau built himself a tiny house just a few miles from his hometown of Concord. Then he wrote about the adventures in thought he undertook each day, as full of incident as any Melville reported from his ocean voyage. For after all what we have from each of them is a story, undertaken finally in imagination rather than in fact. If any part of my life has been worthwhile, it will have been those thoughts I offered to my students…

TIME & MEANING

Consciousness confers on us the unusual powers of memory and imagination. These allow our minds to create the illusion of past and future. Unlike most of the concepts consciousness introduces into experience and implants in language, the illusion of past and future is easy to expose.

On the last leg of a six-day cycling race in France, I fell in with a young guy from Boston who, unlike most people, was enthusiastic after he asked about my work and I said I’d been a philosophy professor. As we rode along, he asked for an example of the sort of things I think about.

I told him about once seeing a sign in front of a tavern when we’d been hiking around Zermatt. It said: FREE BEER TOMORROW.

“Why don’t they ever have to give away any beer?” I asked. He hesitated. “Because it’s never tomorrow?” he said. “Just so,” I said. “So that means,” he said, “there’s always only today.”

I agreed with him again. “Yesterday” and “tomorrow” don’t name locations. They are projections of memory and imagination. Time, in other words, is a function of human consciousness. There is indeed a flow of events and processes, but it is we who divide it into periods, in the same way that we impose things like longitude and latitude upon the world and section the planet into time zones.

So the world and time don’t have qualities apart from our interests. Similarly, the world and our lives in it have no meaning. No meaning, that is, other than what we designate as meaningful. In this way meaning is like our feelings: it originates in us just feelings are not caused by things but assigned to them by me.

So the world has neither qualities or meaning, until we interpret it.

It would be no surprise if you found this assertion threatening. For it does threaten our desire to have the world answer to our needs; to have our lives fulfilled in some way by history. But the universe has no purpose, just as it’s expansion has no direction.

Of course an important ingredient in this desire of ours to have the world answer to our needs is our awareness—also uniquely human—that we will die. I have at some point to give up my life, though other lives, and the course of the world, will continue. It’s a frightening thing to know. So much so that we are anxious to avoid directly addressing death.

We want our lives to go on, and have, over all the millenia since consciousness arose, invented schemes and stories to tell ourselves we can live forever. Such beliefs are fantasies. Yet in every language and culture there have been those who have questioned beliefs of this sort. Questions are the path to wisdom…

PHENOMENOLOGY & EXISTENCE

Philosophy arose in 6th century BCE Athens and, in Greek, means “love of wisdom.” It’s a popular misconception that wisdom means having answers. That’s false. The quality of wisdom depends upon questions. “Questions are the essence of freedom, because they can always be asked, whereas answers can only be enforced.”

There were two great philosophers in the 20th century, one Austrian—Ludwig Wittgenstein—and one German—Martin Heidegger. Their parallel but linked interpretations produced a fundamental divide between “Continental” philosophy and the “Anglo-American” school, Wittgenstein’s guiding question was “what is language?” Heidegger’s: “What is Being?”

Philosophy at Stanford in the 50s was “linquistic analysis,” as the practice deriving from Wittgenstein had come to be called. I became interested in “phenomenology”—the method originating in German thought. There were only two U.S. university departments supporting such studies; one of them was Penn State, which is where I wrote my PhD dissertation under John Anderson.

Heidegger’s question “what is Being?” revives the oldest inquiry in the history of philosophy. The first thing we discover in asking the question is that consciousness a uniquely human ability: we are capable simultaneously of doing something and of being aware we are doing it.

That is, consciousness—or mind—always has a dual quality. This experience of duality misleads us into picturing the world—like we ourselves—to have two aspects: one in the foreground, the other in the background. “Appearance” and “reality” exemplify this mistake, as do “mind” and “body,” “subject” and “object,” and many more.

The word “phenomenon” means “appearance.” So the first insight of phenomenology is that there are only appearances. The second is that things appear only to us. In other words, only humans have the power to attend to the world—or the environment—as a whole process. All modern knowledge, especially the sciences, depends upon this power.

“To exist” means to “stand out.” It follows that only humans exist: only human being—that is human consciousness—can both occupy a position and bring the world into relation to that position. This is a brief version of one of Heidegger’s early insights.

One way to grasp the significance of this insight is to realize it is the basis of our knowledge of death. Memory and imagination enable us to extend our awareness, recalling a past and projecting a future. So I am able to imagine a time at which I’ve ceased to exist, a world in I am no longer present. This is the source of our deepest hatred and fear…