Blog Posts

So this week is shaping up to be a rough week in a rough year. I will spare you, gentle reader, a rehearsal of all of the things that have made my 2011 difficult. Some of them are well known, and others are simply unbloggable. What makes 2011 so remarkable is how difficult it also seems to have been for my friends. So many people I know are dealing with painful changes: Careers ending. Relationships ending. Moving to new places. Loved ones dying. None of these things are precisely new or unique to this year, but the quantity of these events in the lives of those I love and respect has been striking. Not all of these events are even bad– sometimes things must end to move us on towards better things to come– but all of them entail painful change.

And yet tonight has been a very good night despite a very lousy day. I received a package in the mail from a dear, dear friend that lightened my mood instantaneously. My son fell and hit his head right before preschool ended today, but he was fine and in high spirits tonight. We spent the evening reading books, reenacting the light saber fights from The Empire Strikes Back, and watching Dancing With the Stars. It was a great night, all things considered.

Not long ago I would not have been able to set aside the day’s cares like this. Knowing me, they will probably revisit me at four in the morning unbidden and unwelcome. But I am learning that the sources of worry, concern and fear in my life are not appreciably pacified by my obsessive worrying. The worry will return when it will, and I will have the same traction on what worries me if I worry for five minutes as I would if I worry for five hours. There is room in my life for delight. There must be, otherwise I am barely alive.

I also sense that as 2011 slouches to a close, good things are beginning to grow in the hollows the beginning of the year left behind. Old things are passing on, and what is close seems sometimes trackless waste; but new things form, still vague and shapeless, on the far-off horizon. Some of them have been coming from way off for a very long time, or so it seems. Formerly close people become distant in both physical and spiritual space, and others formerly distant are drawn closer.

It was ever thus, though until recently to my shame I had failed to notice it. The biggest lesson I am learning is that, in my zeal to make life happen before this year began, I simply failed to notice that life was happening all around me and that it continually escaped my attention. I now know that, for me at least, living is often little more than noticing.

For those of you keeping score at home, I am rather newly single. My marriage of twelve years ended in divorce in July of this year. If this comes as news to you, I regret that you are finding out this way. I hasten to add, lest you be inclined to worry, that I am doing just fine. I am in fact doing rather well, perhaps better than I feel like I have a right to be doing. On good days, I don’t second-guess how well I am doing and simply enjoy my life.

One thing, though, just doesn’t feel right: My apartment.

I moved out of the house my ex-wife and I shared in April and into a second-floor loft thing with two bedrooms and a full bath on a third floor. It is what is commonly known as a nice place. It’s in a nice part of town, everything works and is clean, the landlords respond to service calls and questions quickly. I haven’t done a lot of entertaining, but everyone who comes over expresses more or less the same sentiment: This is a nice place. More than one person, including my mother, has told me that the place would be great for having women over. Not that I am looking to do that sort of entertaining at the moment, but I can kinda see what people mean. This is a nice place.

I hate it. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

Let’s set to one side for a moment the fact that the rent is high (by local standards; my friends in denser markets would kill for the rent I pay here). This place is, well, just too nice. It’s like a really wonderful hotel room. It has no character. I like to think I know character. My apartment in graduate school had character. It was built in the forties and still had plaster walls. It had color-flecked laminate flooring in the kitchen that laid down in giant sheets that were curling and cracking around the edges. And that floor was profoundly dirty. I kid you not, it had grime on it dating back to the Ford Administration on the kitchen floor. The place had radiator heat that was out of control in the winter; I had to strip down at the door to avoid getting bathed in sweat.

The place was not quite a shambles; it was well-maintained for its age and quiet. But it had obviously seen a fair few winters. It was great.

Where I live now is too put together. It conveys an image of middlebrow achievement, of heroic competence, that is utterly at odds with my personality. And it has a fireplace, which is just comically swank, like a new college grad wearing his first interview suit out to pick up women. I currently have the thing blocked in with twenty boxes full of philosophy books, which seems about right.

I am doing well, but I am not really what one would call put together. A lot of people think I am. This is what is called “fooling the world.” I think I can fake being put together pretty well; in fact, I have been faking it for years. I am both practiced at this act and clever. My high school classmates voted me “Most Likely to Succeed,” which shows just how long I have been at it.

Underneath it all, though, I am not Competent Guy.

I am not quite a shambles, either. I’m just complicated: A drafty old place with spiral stairs and half the windows painted shut and radiators that you can’t turn off. The roof leaks and the front door has about twelve locks on it from a crazy old previous resident. It’s also subtly and unmistakably dirty. But it somehow all hangs together. And I think that one may as well live in surroundings that reflect one’s personality. Life is too short to put on an act forever.

So much to the chagrin of my family and local friends, I think I shall be moving when my lease is up next year. This place is nice, but it’s too safe and clean, too sterile and empty. It’s not alive. It’s the kind of place my separated self thought would deflect questions and quizzical looks. I shall winter here, but come spring, it’s off to someplace alive.

 

Today I have heavy topics on my mind: nature, chance, and fate. I have talked myself into a tentative thesis: Eventually, every person who lives long enough has to contend in one way or another with these three. The critical edge of this thesis is that most human social institutions, especially in modern times, aim to reduce our exposure to nature, chance, and fate. I don’t really know where to go from there, and I am not comfortable with some of the possible implications of this view. In general, I like human social institutions, and I certainly don’t want anyone to take me for one of the flock of Know-Nothings in contemporary American life who affect a pretty good pose of wanting to turn the clock back on the last two centuries of historical experience. (Looking at you, Tea Party.) I’m not sure that my view, suitably understood, has specific political implications, beyond perhaps ascribing limits to what we can expect politics, progressive or conservative, to achieve.

The best way into what I am thinking is through an excursus on Aristotle. Aristotle’s metaphysics is famous for, among other things, drawing a distinction between the “accidents” of things– those properties of things that undergo change over time– and their substance, an enduring substratum that provides the thread of enduring continuity underlying all of the changes the thing undergoes. Aristotle also invokes this notion of substance in order to explain what later came to be called the “essence” of a thing– in other words, why a thing over the course of its development seems to become a certain kind of thing and not some other kind. Calves do not grow up to walk upright and play the piano; humans do not grow up to moo and graze. Aristotle himself does not, to my knowledge, use a single word translatable as “essence” for this notion, however. On numerous occasions, he instead uses a rather odd-sounding circumlocution in Greek that I won’t attempt to reproduce here. It is difficult to translate literally, I am told, but I am reassured by others I trust on matters like these that the best English equivalent is something like the “what it was to be” of a thing.

Independently of any philological stake in the original Greek, I find the “what it was to be” of a thing to be a rather elegant notion. Certainly it is more evocative than the word “essence,” less tied to that word’s ponderous Latin origins. For Aristotle, there is a “what it was to be” for everything. Not everything becomes what it was to be. Both in the realms of nature and human production, things are sometimes thwarted from becoming what they were to be. What Aristotle says about nature is famously complicated, but I think it is fair to say that Aristotle would have thought that in nature things for the most part do become what they were to be. However, human existence is not similarly favored. A central premise of Aristotle’s ethics and politics is that humans are odd among natural kinds in that they do not become what they were to be absent some deliberate cultivation and art. The philosopher, according to Aristotle, has some role to play in clarifying just which practices of cultivation and socialization are conducive to humans developing into what they were to be and which are not. Aristotle’s virtue-theoretic approach to ethics and political theory is his own attempt at such clarification.

I do not pretend to know whether any of what I have just attributed to Aristotle is worth believing on the merits. Substance-based accounts in metaphysics have numerous liabilities, some of which Aristotle himself is honest enough to point out. I have long harbored something of an animus for virtue-theoretic solutions in philosophical ethics, especially Aristotle’s own description of what constitutes virtue. (One can, and many have, substituted different accounts of virtue for Aristotle without substantial alteration of the underlying approach.) I only recall all of these things today for intensely personal reasons: I do not feel like I have become what I was to be. Nor do I feel like human societies in general are what they were to have been. I don’t think that Aristotle has the answer to this problem, but I think he names the problem, or at least nearly enough.

One of the explanatory burdens of an account of human existence’s place in nature this general and ambitious is to point a finger, at least, in the direction of explaining this pervasive sense that human affairs are not what they were to have been. It is probably too much to ask a philosophical theory to explain the ultimate cause of human existence’s being set off at a relative distance from the rest of nature; this is the task of mythos, broadly conceived. Yet what we might do, and what Aristotle does, is take a poll of the alternatives. Is human society no more prone to friction with the rest of nature than the rest of nature is with itself? Or are human affairs especially exposed to luck or chance, a sort of causal deficit in the natural order? Or is it fate, a causal surplus that steers nature awry for the sake of its own ends? Or perhaps it is both?

Nature, chance, fate: These days, it is only literary types who think they have anything to say about these things. Life in the “advanced nations” is structured in such a way as to eliminate or minimize the extent to which any of these things has any meaningful role to play in what happens. Even natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes are captured, however roughly, in the conceptual net of contemporary risk mitigation strategies. Even at the level of the individual’s life, we are discouraged from appealing to a person’s nature or to chance or fate. Instead, we have agency and capacity, and we have rights claimed and rights honored (or breached). The institutions of “normal” life– positive law, bureaucratic government, and the like– allow us to develop our life plans in such a way as to take only minimal account of notions like nature, chance and fate, however insensibly we might feel that they may play around the uttermost horizons of our everyday existence. Nature, chance and fate are hard for us to integrate into a meaningful life.

Yet I am coming to believe that my life is not explicable in terms that do not appeal at some level to nature, chance and fate. They are a threefold cord woven finely, almost imperceptibly, into my life and the choices I have made when I pay close enough attention to them. I cannot and dare not speak for you in this regard. Nor do I even say for myself that these are the only factors at play in making my life what it is. I am largely responsible for how my life has turned out and claim full responsibility for the effect, positive or negative, my actions have had on others. But there is something more to my agency than just my agency. Even Kant, the paradigmatic philosopher of free will and moral agency, concedes in his philosophy of religion that actual agency has a certain blind spot that reflection cannot entirely master. The best we can do is cope with it.

Knowing how a lot of my friends think, I suspect that their first instinct will be to call this “something more” God. To which I say: maybe. I believe in God, and the God in which I believe has something to do with everything. So if you want to call this “God,” I won’t stop you. To my ear, however, calling it “God” will for most people make it more difficult to take in what I am struggling to point towards. For most people, including many atheists, talk of “God” evokes something akin to fate, to supernatural overdetermination, in a way that is indifferent to nature and forecloses chance completely. This isn’t to say that one can’t have a theology built around a God whose grip on the created order isn’t principally secured by the tight leash of fate or destiny or providence. It’s just that most people don’t have a theology like that. And for my part, I try to get by with as little of a theology as I can. I let my more theologically disposed friends carry that burden for me.

Maybe I will have further thoughts on this some other time. For now, I submit the above for your patient consideration.

This blog post is the only commentary I will make on the subject of the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. You may feel free to comment on this post, but do not expect that I will respond.

I have spent the last three years studiously ignoring the Casey Anthony case. My general position regarding show trials has been, ever since the O.J. Simpson case, that I have no interest in them. I have never sat in judgment in such a case as a member of a jury, and for a variety of reasons I never will. (If you don’t understand why, ask a prosecutor or a criminal defense attorney.) I also recognize no broader obligations of citizenship that would compel me to familiarize myself with the facts of such cases and offer an inexpert opinion on the defendant’s guilt or innocence, the prosecution of the case, or the appropriateness of the jury’s verdict. In the present instance, I am not and have never been a resident of the state of Florida, and I know next to nothing about the prevailing criminal laws, rules of criminal procedure, and rules of evidence. From the standpoint of a concerned citizen, I am far more concerned with macro-level statistics about criminal justice systems: things like racial disparities in incarceration rates and sentencing, irrationalities in mandatory sentencing guidelines, and so forth.

So, suffice it to say that I have made it so that I don’t know enough about the Casey Anthony trial to offer any kind of judgment on the jury’s verdict. I will leave that to others with more knowledge of the case and/or more relaxed epistemic scruples.

I do have one remark to make, though, on the opinion, widely reported as uncontroverted fact, that the verdict was somehow a “bombshell” or a “surprise.” I know a fair few attorneys. I did not conduct a poll of them all prior to the verdict, but from those who did comment in my presence, a consensus emerged around three points:

1) Casey Anthony is most likely guilty of murdering her daughter.

2) The prosecution did not meet its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in this case.

3) Casey Anthony would probably be acquitted.

This consensus correctly predicted the outcome of the trial. Personally, since this consensus was expressed by multiple attorneys I trust and respect, I would have been surprised if the jury did convict. My impression is that the only ones who can claim to be blindsided by this verdict are a) those in the media who, for pay, have crafted a narrative whose only logical endings are Casey Anthony’s conviction or boundless outrage at her unthinkable acquittal, and b) those who have uncritically adopted that narrative as their own. My cynicism also leads me to speculate that those media figures who were most invested in the story knew full well that the jury was likely to acquit and so hyped the certainty of her guilt and eventual conviction as a way of manufacturing outrage at the outcome and driving ratings even higher.

No, wait, no one in the media could be that phony, that callous, that manipulative.

Could they?

No, really. Could they?