This is because I’ve finally capitulated to joining two book clubs for the year, ’s and ’s. You can find a whole host of other options for joining a reading club, especially if it’s fiction-oriented, at ’s highly regarded reader fellowship and helpful page: Book Group Directory.

Not only am I beginning to read the scheduled books, I’m reading accompanying essays and beginning to think about and comment on them. This is mostly happening in Substack Notes.

I should, of course, try to pull together the themes that strike me, and write substantive explanations and arguments, but my thoughts are all still pretty inchoate. Taking it piecemeal and putting my immediate sources out there is maybe a better place to start, and an invitation and entrée, in any case.

Since Notes tend to fly by in their feed — or not find you at all, given the Algorithm — and since they quickly lapse ephemerally into the void, I thought I’d collect a few here, which are either on point or at least adjacent to being on point.

Would love to hear your comments.

Leave a comment

Note: if you subscribe and read by email vs. the Substack app, and this post has gotten too long, you’ll need to click to read in full — and then click again to open each Note to read in full. Sorry about that!

And here is a bonus read, which I didn’t re-stack into Notes (yet), but which I’ve found delightful and worth starting a trial subscription to access behind the paywall.

I wish I had received this advice, and followed it, 40 years ago:

Mary Harrington

Advice for Young Writers

Recently, a talented young woman asked for advice on beginning a writing career. Implicitly, she meant: opinion journalism, maybe political. Did I have any tips for starting out? I told her the same thing I’ve told others who asked: I’m the worst possible source of such counsel, because I didn’t really set out to do this for a living. But supposing for a moment that I might have something helpful to offer aspiring writers in their twenties, it would go something like this…

Read more

a year ago · 56 likes · 10 comments · Mary Harrington

PS. It turns out I can comp a few free one-month subscriptions to and if you DM me your email address. Happy to do that. And to have Pose Ponder subscribers join me in reading.

If any of these musings interest you, stay in touch to receive whatever is forthcoming. 🤪

Subscribe now

I actually think I’m way down on that list, compared to the youngsters. But I acknowledge that I’m more online and more plugged-in than I ever have been in my life.

What’s happening with you? I’m genuinely curious to hear what readers of this meandering and somewhat lapsed newsletter/blog have been up to, what you’re currently reading, what you’re doing, what you’re preoccupied with.

Leave a comment

Or, re-stack this post and add a personal note.

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On my end, I’ve been traveling and tuned in to a lot of family stuff.

My father-in-law passed away right before Christmas after months of decline and hospice care. For two years now, family members have been anticipating what to do with “the estate,” which includes a bunch of struggling businesses in the Philippines that my father-in-law started in his old age. These include — no less — a small, regional hospital (he was a prominent orthopedic surgeon and inventor) and a resort hotel. It may sound grand to imagine “settling an estate,” but it’s more like a call for his five children to put their independent, late-career lives completely on hold to deal with the fallout. “Hundreds of livelihoods” depend on these businesses, we keep hearing. There’s a ton of responsibility, and the reality on the ground is not pretty.

It all has got me thinking about the nature of business in service to local communities, the nature of investment in general (what the h— is capitalism and business all about, anyway?), and the challenges of leaving — and being left — a Legacy.

Thoughts on Community

Since putting my writing on pause last fall, I’ve been hard at work setting up a community for lifelong learners. For real this time. No more teasers and feints.

I remember way back in the day (early 90’s) when I began homeschooling my children, it was early days for online forums. Trivium-at-home (TAH), an email-based group for about 75 homeschooling moms (and a couple dads) saved me. It was also early days for homeschooling, and even earlier days for anyone attempting to formulate and deliver a classical education to their kids at home. TAH members had a lot to talk about, and to re-invent for their new use case from all the traditions we tapped into for inspiration and guidance.1

I keep hearing today that IRL and local are the way forward for civic cohesion, saving our democracy, and attaining to a new kind of politics that might actually make sense or solve real problems — and I believe that.2 But I also know it’s incredibly difficult to “find your people” solely in local, IRL environs. Being online gives access to people all over the world, and TAH was my online access to a world of classical home educators who had similar visions for raising and teaching their kids and who had educational backgrounds and ambitions similar to my own. How many graduate-degree holding moms of many children left the wider world behind in those days — and a promising career — to focus on teaching their kids and trying to re-invent education itself? TAH was that kind of group. It changed my life.

My mantra, expressed in just about every other post to TAH, was “What is a classical education, anyway?”

Sometimes, you just have to keep asking the question, and posing and pondering all possible answers. By the time I finally wrote college entrance application letters for my kids a decade or so later, I had more or less settled on a three-way definition. Classical education is comprised of: 1) the trivium arts, the language-based three of the classical liberal arts, 2) study of the Great Books, and 3) the “classics” specifically of ancient Greece and Rome, i.e. Greek and Latin languages, history, and literature. My kids received all three components of this educational mix in some degree — and they’ve done well with that foundation.

Their education wasn’t perfect, however. It was overly western civ oriented. After delving deeper into the histories, philosophies, and languages of Asia — and after traveling not only in Asia, but also across Europe and Africa — I’ve come to appreciate the pressing need to 1) adopt better methods than trivium arts; 2) take a wider worldwide perspective on Great Books and classics; and above all 3) update all considerations for the sake of the real world out there, and a completely new era humans are living in.

Hence my current tagline and mission re: the Anthropocene.

Let’s be forward-looking, not backward-looking — but, ideally, without loss. Ancient wisdom traditions, encapsulated in those Great Books and classics — and including religious traditions, including Christianity (Blessed Theophany today, by the way!) — might help in the Anthropocene. I hope so. But empirical evidence seems to indicate they’re culturally much ignored at this point, except by Golden Agers and Benedict Option types, i.e. backward thinkers and escapists. That’s a shame. There needs to be a better critical appreciation of… legacies and traditions.

Anyway…

All that ramble is meant to say how important it was for me at a crucial point in my early adulthood, at a point when I was bearing an awful lot of responsibility for the care of others, to able to join an online community. I needed a place to support my own learning post formal education (which did not set me up to live a good life) and to help be a better TLC — teacher, leader, coach, for my kids and a few significant others.

Over the intervening years, that sense of responsibility has branched out to include other families, adult learners in my parish and at the seminary where I taught, and a wider and growing group of acquaintances online. Don’t we all have ongoing — even expanding — obligations towards our children, towards families in local IRL communities, towards fellow adult learners in our workplaces, parishes, and social milieus, including online?

I want that kind of community back, and so far I haven’t found it — IRL or online — so I’m creating it.3

Coming Up in 2025

For 2025, I’ll be back to writing here, with a slight rebrand. My thought is to get back to more of the original cadence and format of the “Daily Inchoate,” which was how I started substack’ing back in November 2023. I want to write off the cuff and share what I’m learning and thinking about, I’ll also float here first some (maybe crazy) proposals for an Anthropocene focused, lifelong-learner re-think. I’m counting on you, dear readers, to give feedback.

I also want to write fuller, slightly more formal essays. But those will take time and will need a less busy, noisy home than Substack. I have an old Ghost blog that I’ll eventually resurrect for that purpose.

But the community — Sojourners — will be the thing this year. Along with adult focused lifelong learning, reading and writing, it’ll cater to travelers, since travel is one of the absolute best ways to learn beyond the books, beyond the ever-online, beyond one’s own IRL local. Travel gets you to the local of other places in the world, other people, other life ways, other versions of humans living the Anthropocene, for better or worse than what we ourselves are living through here and now, wherever you are personally.4

Sojourners will also cater to TLCs, the teachers, small group leaders, and coaches of the world who are working to bring others along, their own children, their neighbors and friends, their travel buddies, their colleagues, their parishioners and civic organization co-conspirators.

Everybody’s an obligatory learner today, far beyond whatever formal credentials they’ve accumulated or job-career “upskilling” they’ve undertaken.

To be good citizens in a democracy, good members of a culture and society, good neighbors to family, friends and local acquaintances, good inheritors of legacy “estates,” good humans in this Anthropocene, we’ve got to keep on wrestling with the history and geography, philosophy and theology, politics and economics, science and technology, languages and literatures, useful and fine arts — and all the rest of it. It’s a lot. No one can do everything. We should gang together a bit.

Watch for forthcoming on Sojourners’ launch. I’ll be recruiting ten first founding members soon. If you think you need to be one of those ten, or if you’d just like to be sure to be on the list, DM me.

Oh, and subscribe, if you haven’t already.

Happy New Year. Blessed Theophany.

4

Some relevant subscriptions you might want to consider:

Chris Arnade Walks the World

Dispatches and photos from walks around the world

Hickman's Hinterlands

A ledger of obscure travels, backwoods rambles, rough bivouacs, and cackling cartographies.

By A.M. Hickman

Those Who Wander

A newsletter for readers who want to learn about the meaning of travel, why we seek adventure, and how to incorporate more of it into our lives. In short, the anthropology of wandering.

By Justin S. Bailey

Every time I read an article that's trying to unravel our disaster of a health care system (like this investigative report), it makes me want to advocate a divide and conquer approach. Put simply, health care isn't just one thing. It's at least three.

Well Care

The most basic kind of health care is well care and minimal intervention care like your annual physical, routine lab work, medicine for your daughter's ear infection, even a non-surgical bone set and cast for a broken arm, plus follow-up and some physical therapy.

This kind of health care is routine, lifelong, can mostly be provided by a primary care physician or physician's assistant or nurse practitioner on an out-patient basis. Everybody needs it. It shouldn't be outrageously expensive, and for the most part, everybody should pay for his or her own, just like we have to pay for food, housing, transportation, and all other regular living expenses.

For people who neglect routine medical care for themselves or their families, thereby pushing themselves up into higher tier needs, one could imagine imposing some fairly strict penalties. I'm not talking about forcing people to buy mandatory health insurance. I'm talking about people taking responsibility for their everyday lives, including routine health care. If financial assistance is needed, it would be on a par with food stamps or subsidized housing.

True Insurance

The second kind of health care is a true insurance problem. It has to do with risk and rarity. It’s based on probabilities where a large potentially-at-risk crowd pays to cover the small percentage of people who are actually affected.

We buy fire insurance because IF our house burns down, we'll need help with replacement costs. The risk is low, the event is rare, but for the few people whose house does burn down, the negative impact is incredibly high. So we're willing to group together with others, pay a small fee to cover the risk, and pay out to the unfortunate few who draw the short end of the stick – because we would want them to do the same for us. Medically, this means we need true health insurance to cover treatment required after a car accident or a fall, or if we get cancer.

Whether true health insurance should cover metabolic disease (diabetes, heart disease, lung cancer in smokers), where risks are closely related to predictable, controllable, and known behavioral or environmental factors is something I'm not competent to judge, and we can admit there are issues here. On the other hand, insurance analysts specialize in determining the cost of providing car insurance to male drivers under the age of 25 who drive expensive sports cars. I'm sure it can be figured out.

In any case, a true insurance problem is an entirely different class of medical care from well care, with a dramatically different kind and level of funding required. Importantly, it's a need that deserves to be met by a genuine health insurance system.

Life Stage Care

The third kind of health care is like neither of the other two in the sense that it's neither routine nor lifelong, yet it's potentially major – but it's also predictable and a different kind of risk, if it even really classifies as risk. This is health care related to life stage, whether maternity care, neonatal care, the challenges of aging, or end of life care. Healthcare related to certain vocations might be similar, such as the sports medicine required by athletes.

This is a partial list – perhaps menopause, or puberty, or divorce-death of spouse, or other life stage events would qualify similarly. Everyone goes through a set of predictable life stages, and their needs vary along the way. To be sure, only women require maternity care, and today few enough women even have children... but it's still a demographically-based category and applies to most people in the category.

Exact health care needs for individuals in a given stage or vocational group could range widely. That's okay. Most babies are born healthy, most pregnancies are normal. Some (few) old people age gracefully and die peacefully at home in their sleep, but many don't. When needed, life stage specialists usually need to handle not only medical concerns but related emotional, family, social, and job-related challenges. Life stage health care impacts the whole of life.

Again, there are plenty of issues to be sorted out here, but life-stage or vocational health care requires yet another and different sort of system to provide and pay for it. It is more on a par with saving up for children's college education, or dealing with retirement. Most people should be responsible for their own care – possibly with some risk-based insurance type options built in if that makes sense.

Financial assistance, where provided, might be comparable to helping people take responsibility for long term financial planning. Education, incentivizing, and applications of nudge theory could work. Or, maybe we do need special programming, whether provided by private or public institutions, by businesses, non-profits, or local community centers, with funding secured and expended as makes the most sense for each life stage or demographic. In any case, again we're talking about a very different kind of health care challenge compared with well care or risk-based medical insurance.

Conclusion

I'd like to see our thinking about health care divided out completely into separate departments, with appropriate solutions developed for each of them independently. Bundling together creates a dysfunctional health care behemoth where doctors and patients get taken advantage of by "the system," costs keep on rising, quality of care keeps falling, and human health statistics such as infant mortality rates, rates of chronic disease, and longevity compare negatively to the rest of the developed world. A recent report from the Commonwealth Fund provides damning evidence.

Given vested interests and entrenched institutions and infrastructure, I don't have much confidence that a mere conceptual shift could help, but I feel compelled to at least throw it out there.

In anticipation of a more expansive future post, here is one small nugget of inspiration from ch. 3 that did strike me. Callard is offering her theory of aspiration as a better resolution of Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of intrinsic conflict. We often find ourselves conflicted internally, that is, in our beliefs/desires — or as Callard reframes it, in our values. Her concept of aspiration is that it necessitates a rather paradoxical move from something we do not (yet) value (to the extent we want to, or should), to a place where we do value it, complete with full-on changes in belief, desire, behavior, will, and action. Aspiring, we’re eventually able to achieve a better and higher sense of moral responsibility and to become improved, better people.2 Concerned Anthropocene citizens and lifelong learners will find aspiration a compelling phenomenon as it plays out in human culture, society, and psychology.

Almost by accident, as a segue into a reflection on Aristotle and his supposed lack of a concept of will, Callard sets out the following observation. She says Frankfurt favors “structural explanations” over Aristotle’s “genealogical” or historical ones.

It is a theme of Frankfurt’s work, early and late, to reject genealogical explanations in favor of what he calls “structural” explanations. He wants, for instance, to resist the idea—which he associates with Aristotle—that an agent could be responsible for what she does at one time in virtue of something she did at another, earlier time. What matters, according to Frankfurt, is what the agent wills or identifies with at the time of action, and not earlier. And so he endeavors to capture the ethically salient features of personhood in terms of relations in which the agent stands to herself (her desires, motives, commitments) at the time of action. But some of the relations in which an agent stands to herself might be essentially historical. To be an aspirant is to proceed away from some (rejected) past set of desires, commitments, etc. toward a different, anticipated future desire set of desires, commitments, etc. Aspiration is a form of ethical movement, and nothing can move in a moment. (p. 146)

It sounds technical, but the distinction being made here is huge. It underlies not only the psychological quandary at hand, about causality or identity — what “made” you the way you are? with what values do you “identify” right now? — but how whole cultures and societies progress through history, and whether they “progress” at all.

A “structure,” I take it, whether psychological and internal, or social or cultural, or ecological or technological or governmental, is a kind of given that organizes the way things are, in the present as Frankfurt says. It rationalizes, specifies, and constrains behavior and decision-making, even thinking, in some sort of system. Structure affects individuals as well as collectives.3

A “genealogy” or history, on the other hand, whether personal or national, of a population or species, age or era, traces change over time. Genealogy is concerned with origins, causality, development, growth, goals or ends, means for getting there, and seeing purpose or teleological directionality toward something, and away from something else. Aspiration is a profoundly genealogical phenomenon, so Callard is right to call out her difference with Frankfurt.

But all this reminds me of the argument constitutionalists (let’s call them that) make against progressives, specifically thinkers who worry political and educational leaders like the Roosevelts (Teddy and FDR both), Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and others, who, according to the critique, played awfully fast and loose with the founding framework of our country in order to push a vision of change and evolution, and of Progress.4

A war of metaphor ensued.

Should governance be essentially “mechanical” — i.e. a structural system of checks and balances, enumeration of separate powers, carefully defined rights, levels, and branches of government, constitutions, institutions, an appreciation for the rational and regulated order of things by natural law and (eternal and objective) truths and morals. It’s science. It’s even a sort of technology. Picture a well-functioning clock.

Or, is a more appropriate metaphor an “organic” one, envisioning a polity with dynamic powers, evolving, improving, adapting? It changes and grows with context, incorporating a wide range of relevant factors, never completely constituted or made, but always in process, working towards some end or goal, perhaps tentative and temporary or possibly an envisioned perfection. Picture a powerful animal, reaching, leaping, striving. Or, picture Hegel and the 19th century rise of historicism, a philosophical movement that comes comfortably to house Marx and much of the (progressive) Left.

Here is Ronald Pestritto on Woodrow Wilson during a podcast at American Mind.

That’s one of the more well-known ways Wilson has of expressing [it]… That’s a metaphor he uses on the campaign trail in 1912. If you can imagine—the language … is drawn from his book The New Freedom, which is simply an edited collection of his campaign addresses. So if you can imagine a candidate saying this on the campaign trail in 1912, the idea that the founders—he [Wilson] said they took Montesquieu, this French political philosopher who talked about separation of powers, they took him a little too seriously. They read him with true scientific enthusiasm, I think is the phrase that Wilson uses in 1912. So they had this sort of very fixed and mechanical view of things, but no, government’s organic. We progressives want to interpret the Constitution according to Darwin.

And yet, the context is a prolonged, deep complaint about the growth of “administration,” the deep state, and the institutionalization and bureaucratization of government, including the installation of experts — of scientists.5

For its part, conservatism, at least some versions of it, has a high regard for history and tradition, for conserving whatever from the past is good as times change. Partly it may be a reverence for unassailable eternal truths inherent in things at all times, a (God-given) cosmic order, but partly also, it’s a sort of reverse historicism that sees decadence and decay today, with a Golden Age lying in the past. A more activist conservative version, as we see emerging in the New Right, sees that Golden Age as potentially recoverable and lying in the future after all, recoverable through a new form of conservatively activist government. This is a vastly different sort of “progressivism.”

Given the slipperiness between mechanism and organicism, between structure and history or genealogy, it seems clear we need both.

Aspiring people, cultures, nations, and species aiming to be better need both a solid structure and framework within which to grow and an imperative not to remain stuck in old forms and ways that no longer function and cannot adapt.

A structure provides foundation, sheltering roof, boundaries or walls, security, refuge, pattern and order, storage and resources.

Change, growth, evolution, adaptation, movement — generation, genealogy6 and history — these avoid stagnation, decadence, devolution, entropy, and decay.

Then there is capitalism. Free market defenders defend the free market to the hilt. But it’s a theoretical argument not based on “real existing free markets,” which don’t actually exist. (If you want to follow the one honest(?) attempt to recreate one, see Milei in Argentina.)2 What happens in really existing capitalism? Basically, inequality happens.3 Some other things may happen, too, like deep socio-cultural changes with the rise of rampant individualism.4

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism.5 The preface alone is worth a long ponder, especially in the context of Scott’s other works, including The Art of Not Being Governed and Seeing Like a State, both of which I am also currently re-reading. Here’s the passage from Two Cheers I want to consider today. Apologies for length, but it’s worth quoting in full. The upshot is that there is no democratic freedom without relative (wealth) equality because the hyper-wealthy can and will use their money to manipulate not only markets, but politics.6

The point is simply that huge disparities in wealth, property, and status make a mockery of freedom. The consolidation of wealth and power over the past forty years in the United States, mimicked more recently in many states in the Global South following neoliberal policies, has created a situation that the anarchists foresaw. Cumulative inequalities in access to political influence via sheer economic muscle, huge (statelike) oligopolies, media control, campaign contributions, the shaping of legislation (right down to designated loopholes), redistricting, access to legal knowledge, and the like have allowed elections and legislation to serve largely to amplify existing inequalities. It is hard to see any plausible way in which such self-reinforcing inequalities could be reduced through existing institutions, in particular since even the recent and severe capitalist crisis beginning in 2008 failed to produce anything like Roosevelt’s New Deal. Democratic institutions have, to a great extent, become commodities themselves, offered up for auction to the highest bidder.

The market measures influence in dollars, while a democracy, in principle, measures votes. In practice, at some level of inequality, the dollars infect and overwhelm the votes. Reasonable people can disagree about the levels of inequality that a democracy can tolerate without becoming an utter charade. My judgment is that we have been in the “charade zone” for quite some time. What is clear to anyone except a market fundamentalist (of the sort who would ethically condone a citizen’s selling himself—voluntarily, of course—as a chattel slave) is that democracy is a cruel hoax without relative equality. This, of course, is the great dilemma for an anarchist. If relative equality is a necessary condition of mutuality and freedom, how can it be guaranteed except through the state? Facing this conundrum, I believe that both theoretically and practically, the abolition of the state is not an option. We are stuck, alas, with Leviathan, though not at all for the reasons Hobbes had supposed, and the challenge is to tame it. That challenge may well be beyond our reach.

Note a few things:

• Wealthy parties get involved not only in the market as capitalists (they’re the main source of capital for investing), but also in politics, and they have a vast range of “huge state-like” tools at their disposal.

• Wealthy parties have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo, the system that has generated their wealth. Ergo, existing political institutions will not provide avenues for change.

• Dollars swamp votes.

• Market fundamentalists, even when driven by theory alone (much less empirical reality as in “real existing free markets”), are already in morally questionable territory.

• Anarchists — who are against any state as chief Extractor of resources (grain) and corvée labor (and this applies to all historical states up until the last couple centuries)7 — face a dilemma, because only the state can guarantee some level of equality, and hence, freedom and mutuality.

Scott doesn’t buy Hobbes’ argument for Leviathan, that the state must arise to protect humans from each other, humans who would otherwise be living in a state of nature where their lives would be “nasty, poor, brutish, and short.” This is because Scott actually sees a high degree of mutuality — i.e. social cooperation without hierarchy or state rule — amongst non-state people. Such cooperation is not, to be sure, at the level of Rousseau’s romanticized “noble savage.” Nevertheless, Scott concludes that some Leviathan may be necessary to counteract modern capitalism in its inequality-generating and freedom-destroying effects. And yet, what happened in 2008?8

It’s arguable, says Scott, where the democratic “charade zone” begins. How much inequality can be tolerated? Personally, I think the answer to that question depends a lot on what the wealthy actually do with their money.

When I asked myself that question: what do they do with it? — I originally came up with three main categories. First, they spend it on luxury goods, houses, yachts, buying up sports franchises, jet setting, throwing parties, I don’t even know what. This first use of wealth is probably what tends either to scandalize — or to provoke envy — amongst most regular people. But I doubt it’s actually a big proportion of the total. Second, they use it as capital for their own projects, or to found institutions, possibly even charitable. Here we think of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. In the past there was John D. Rockefeller and the other “robber barons” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This second kind of spending could be hugely beneficial for whole societies and economies, depending on. When free marketers and capitalists don’t worry (much) about inequality, this is what they’re betting on. Third, the wealthy do what Scott says they’ll do, which is to throw dollars as power into politics and political institutions to make sure the wealth keeps coming in, and the pot is protected from anyone who would take it away. My bet is that both of these second two areas of spending vastly outweigh whatever luxury spending is going on, certainly for the globally rich.

But now, what about the wealthy who are not like Musk or Bezos or even Bill Gates, who do seem to be managing their own wealth, for good or ill? Those three do what they do incredibly publicly. We all know what they’re up to and, given their egos, they react quite strongly in the court of public opinion. But what about the wealthy who rely on “financial experts” to manage their wealth for them? What about the heirs who inherit when the billionaires of the world eventually pass on? What about the remainder of the world’s wealth held by the minor rich and the middle class, as deposited in various sorts of mutual funds? Isn’t all of this managed by those same “financial experts”?

If we’re worried about the role of money and inequality manipulating not only politics, but capital and markets and whole economies, let’s have a look at who is actually managing the wealth. The technical term is, apparently, “assets under management.” Who in the world has the most AUM? And what are they doing?

All this is beyond my competence to untangle, but I’ll leave you with just three screenshots I took this morning based on simple google searches. I can’t verify any of this data. But even if the order of magnitude is roughly indicative, it’s worth a very long ponder as to where we ought to be looking when we’re concerned about the failed or failing systems of the world: political, environmental-economic, and geopolitical.

And for comparision:

The world’s top asset managers and banks manage wealth at a scale greater than all but the very largest of countries. And if you combine even a couple of those asset managers, they out-manage even the wealthiest of countries.

Or maybe we ought to say that the wealth of the wealthiest countries simply is the combined assets managed under these state-like actors.

I’ll be reading more of Scott to see what we non-state, non-wealthy poor — we are genuinely poor by comparison, even if middle class — of the world might do in response.

BTS

In all seriousness, I’ve been hard at work on behind-the-scenes practices for reading, note-taking, PKM, and writing workflow. I’ve taken a couple courses, and I’m going to enroll in Bianca Pereira’s PKM for Researchers Mentorship. That is quite an investment for me, but her Active Note-taking course was revelatory.

In order to tackle the problem of how to be a good human in the Anthropocene, in a systematic and intentional way, my writing here at Pose Ponder needs a solid ponder craft.

FFFs

I’ve also been continuing an all too massive effort2 to get my feeds, follows, and findings (FFFs) under control, after getting “drawn in” (overwhelmed) here on Substack. To this end, I’ve been re-tooling somewhat, realizing that I need a space/place, an “evergreen library” for things I save, whether I read them or not. Such a library is not the same as a read-it-later app, whether Readwise Reader or Omnivore, my erstwhile favorites. Since today’s technology is all about using AI as an assistant, I went looking for an AI-powered bookmarking tool, and I’ve landed on Fabric. I’ve been saving things there for a few weeks now, in hopes of building up enough data that the AI can start being useful. We’ll see. FFFs by their nature are serendipitous. All the Things keep blasting at you, riling up your curiosity antennae (mine are enormous), whether or not the subject line is remotely in the scope of what I’m presently supposed to be working on. I can’t shut it all off, though it’s tempting, if I want to be cognizant of what’s going on in the world. But the Incoming tends to all or nothing. Order must be imposed on this chaos.

Sojourners

More importantly, I’m hard at work on the Sojourners project, which is a community of practice for lifelong learners. One breakthrough was to decide that the project actually needs two communities, the first being a sort of gateway, which will live here on Substack. This community will be dedicated primarily to the arts and thought-craft of reading, to course-based learning for skills and content, to putting a basic knowledge system in place, to writing “first lines,” and to reflecting regularly on higher level priorities. A second community, which (it’s looking like) will be hosted on Discourse — a big rather old-fashioned forum platform3 — will be the place to sink deeper into specialty areas, including the role of travel in lifelong learning; techne and PKMs; research, writing, and action (practice) for the Anthropocene. It will provide a home for TLCs, the teachers, leaders, and coaches who are leading small groups for educational purposes outside mainstream educational institutions — plus their students and mentees. Both communities will be paid offerings. If you’re interested, you can put your email address on the Sojourners list. If you’d be interested in being a beta tester for either community, please send me a DM here on Substack. I don’t want to launch officially until we have at least five to ten active members and we’ve kicked the tires.

Taking a little time to reflect on why the Sojourners lift-off has been so delayed, I’ve had to admit that my project planning and follow through abilities are sorely lacking. Besides spending a lot of time writing here on Substack over the last year, and being “drawn in” to Substack’s ecosystem, and being continually fire-hosed by FFFs invading my attention zone, I’m just not great at project management.4 Put it down to being a former academic and “ideas” person now having to function in the real world, or what you will, I’ve taken a bit of time to up my game. Shout out to the Paperless Movement team and their ICOR methodology, which separates PKM and PPM from BKM and BPM. :o) I have long organized my notes, projects, and tasks around the dimensions of temporary (ephemeral) vs. permanent and messy vs. clean, but thanks to Tom and Paco, I’m clearer now on the need also to separate shallow from deep thinking, and to hone a robust business system for both knowledge and project management, separate from personal work. I’ve also re-discovered Tana!5

Last, I’ve start a rigorous diet and exercise regime, long overdue for a person who sits on the couch reading, or perched at a desk in front of a screen, for far (far) too many hours in a day, and who isn’t getting any younger. That’s taken a lot of TEA (time, energy, attention), too.

Re-think

As promised, I’ve been pondering how to re-organize things here at Pose Ponder to give me mental space, time, and energy both for writing better and for all these projects. It’s been tricky, because I needed to balance what was really going well with what needs to change, so as not to lose anything.6

Here’s where I’m at in the re-think.

• I’ll keep the 3 weeks on, 1 week off cadence.

• I’ll continue to “post” something every day (weekdays). However, daily “posts” will become smaller and more ephemeral jottings, and like as not they will show up on Substack’s Notes rather than as “posts.” Even if I do post, they’ll be web-only reads. Which means, they won’t go out by email. If you like the curated links and resources I’ve been sharing over past months, this is where you’ll now find them: in Notes and web-only posts.

  • Hint: if you want to follow these, you may want to get the Substack app.

  • My profile page will show all my Activity (Notes), Posts, and Likes.

  • I will reinstate the Weekly round-up, which will gather some of these shorter jottings into a weekly mailing. As always, you can opt in or out by “managing your subscription.”

• For the real meat, the intention is to publish longer true essays less frequently than previously. These will go out by email and be permanently available on the Pose Ponder website. I hope to be able to write one per week at a minimum. These will be longer takes on books I’m reading, deeper engagements with a few Substackers whose work provokes me, assays of perennial topics I’m pondering through long term, and Pondercraft pieces on “method.” Pondercraft will dovetail into the Sojourners brand for lifelong learning.

So… Yeah. This is where I’ve been. These are the plans moving forward. May I find the strength to live up to the aspirations!7

As always, thank you for your readership and encouragement.

You get a sense, when you visit a developing country, of whether it’s on the upswing, vibrant, hopeful — or on the downswing, stagnant, barely staving off ruination. Present day Vietnam is decidedly on the upswing. The energy is palpable. Signs of mid-level industrialization such as a massive rice industry, active construction sites, busy shipping in the delta, are everywhere. Not to mention small scale capitalism, not least amongst those street food vendors and local cafes and restaurants.2

Motorbikes scooting around carry riders of all ages and occupations, from well-dressed professionals, to sporty young people, to elders transporting schoolchildren. The locals motorbike. Vans and buses, like as not, are carrying tourists. Cars, with professional drivers, are presumably for the wealthy. Nevertheless, the thousands of them on the roads indicate mid-level prosperity, mobility, and activity.3

Someone might ask about the Communist government compared with Vietnam’s open economy, the latter a phenomenon launched already in the 1980’s (Đổi Mới). The only indication of living under Communism that I saw the whole time we were there, apart from a few strongly gated government buildings flying very red flags, was when our cruise tour guide, a practicing Buddhist, showed us his official ID indicating he is an “atheist.” He had been showing us around the temple of a local ethnic Chinese neighborhood, and we got to talking about the religious melting pot that is Vietnam. Plenty of Buddhist temples, and the historic central Catholic Church under renovation in Ho Chi Minh city, are evidence for effective freedom of religion, but it seems, technically, that one is supposed to, officially, not claim a religious affiliation.

As to the history of Vietnam, for most Americans it centers on the Vietnam War — or rather the Second Indochina War as the Vietnamese themselves call it. (The First Indochina War was their successful fight for independence waged against the French.) In particular, I wanted to confront the person, life, and legacy of Ho Chi Minh, having read about him at length at (a Substack I highly recommend).4 To that end, as good tourists — seeing what Vietnam itself wants to show to us — the War Remnants Museum was one of our first stops. It packs a wallop for any American who visits.5

It’s a simple museum made up mostly of compelling photographs (with some military equipment parked outside) and a running narrative telling the heart wrenching story. That story is told from perspective of the victorious (North) Vietnamese (Communists), with all the atrocities committed by Americans presented front and center. And yet, the very first part of the exhibit shows how much protest raged all over the world against the War, including in Europe and America and the west. And the end result is hardly a condemnation of America itself, with whom the Vietnamese people and government want to be friends. How that paradoxical presentation has been accomplished is quite a feat.

Let’s start with Ho Chi Minh, who on his deathbed, admonished his generals.

“[Do] not humiliate the United States, [do not] touch the American people because we only fight against the hawks who rule the United States.”

He also said, in principle, “not to give in, but [as] to the method, be firm yet improvisational.”

Source: Postcards from Vietnam, part 4 on Ho Chi Minh

Along with starting out with global mass protests against the war, the museum portrays members of the American military in two clearly divided camps: those who committed atrocities and those genuine American patriots who defended the Vietnamese people and sought justice for decades after the fact. One walks out of the museum humiliated to be an American (to the extent one is implicated in what one’s nation has done), yet also faced with a clear choice not to support one’s home nation when it engages in unjust war and military crime.

The attitude is born out in practice. As tourists or expats, Americans encounter zero animosity or hatred from any Vietnamese person on the street, including from older citizens who presumably could have some vivid memories of the war.6 There is either a profound capacity for forgiveness in these people, or there is an equally capacious gift for discerning the complexities of geopolitical tragedy — that the everyday people of any nation don’t necessarily approve of what their government has done.

The museum’s story is one-sided and — one hesitates to say it, for the sake of cultural sensitivity — propaganda. Photo evidence cannot be denied, of course. We’re not talking deep fakes here. But the selection, order and presentation, and accompanying narrative interprets what you see from a definite point of view. For example, the museum sidesteps any atrocities committed by the invading North forces at the end of the War, or of the embedded Viet Cong in the south. An appreciation for political complexity in the wider world doesn’t apply at home.

Nevertheless, the overall message is one of hope: “Lessons learned, let’s move on.” There’s also a strong message of unification, of Vietnam itself as a single country, and of Vietnam together with the rest of the world. The country looks positively on its role as a future (and present day) leader in Asia and in the world, including with the west. Vietnam would today be one of the chief “non-aligned” countries effectively playing the Great Powers off against each other, and I have to say I applaud that. Rather than be forced, as happened during the Cold War, to align with one pole or the other, no small developing country should be deprived of its right to self-determination and to making its own way.

One can’t help but compare Vietnam with North and South Korea, that other Cold War proxy conflict, which in that case, the US “won.” The Koreas are still hopelessly divided and opposed, with military conflict and even nuclear escalation a haunting specter — not to mention the decades long toll taken on the North Korean people. It makes you wonder at how the Vietnamese people, internally diverse as they are, geographically, ethnically, religiously and — once — politically, have been able to overcome tremendous suffering to emerge in rising prosperity and hope.

All of which leads me to wonder how the US (viz. our “hawks” at the time of the War) made such a huge mistake. The Communists won. We lost. We were driven out. Yes, it’s taken 50 years. Vietnam is not at the level of economic development — or political freedom — as South Korea. But it’s doing pretty well. Need we have intervened as we did? What if, after the Geneva Accords, we had supported general elections and let the people of Vietnam unify under whatever government type and leadership its own people preferred, even if that happened to be Communism? Ideally a non-aligned, homegrown version of Communism? We could have demanded protections for former anti-Communists under the new system, or (as we did anyway) accept anyone who felt they had to escape the new regime as exiles to the US.

The argument will be made, of course, given post WW2 realities and the Cold War, that America had to fight vehemently against Communism, against the Chinese and Soviet Union indirectly to avoid nuclear disaster, but directly via conventional proxy wars between client regimes, including against Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in the north.

The underlying story is not that simple. The best characterization of Ho Chi Minh’s interests — as with so many rebels against colonial powers in Asia and globally — was his concern for his own people.7 Probably he should be thought of as more a nationalist than as a Communist puppet or plant. He fought first against the Japanese (by allying with American OSS, forerunners of the CIA), then he fought against the French for independence. Finally he fought against the Americans when they insisted on the proxy war against the Communists in the north (USSR, China).

Ho Chi Minh was assuredly a socialist, then a card-carrying Communist from early days, and he was trained and provided resources specifically from the USSR. (His relationship with China was mixed.) But he also disagreed with Soviet policies and was even detained for years because he wouldn’t align with Party ideology. As many non-aligned developing countries are trying to do today, he attempted to play the Powers off against each other for the sake of his own nation and people.

That, of course, is a charitable view — but it’s not an incredible one.8

I am immensely thankful Vietnam has pulled itself out of the morass of the tragic showdown that took place on its territory, destroying in the process so much life, livelihood, and liberty. Were mistakes made — and I don’t mean solely the grievous tactical crimes committed on the ground? Yes, I think so. The west, including America, forced small poor countries to become divided within themselves and to align, yes or no, black or white, with over-dominant world powers in ways completely alien to their own interests.

Just today, I happened upon a remarkable talk given by Condoleezza Rice a few months ago at the Hoover Institute, “What Does America Stand For?” You may argue it’s old school, dated, too redolent of post-1989 Fukuyama-ism. But this quote, from near the end of the Q&A, stands out to me with respect to ongoing Great Power competition in the developing world. Rice is discussing present day concerns regarding competition with China in Africa. She veers away from what could so easily become a replay of Cold War confrontations.

You can have a policy in Africa that isn't just always responding to the Chinese, the Chinese, the Chinese. Because the Chinese are making a mess of their policy in Africa right now. These debt traps that they've set… people are starting to notice. Maybe that “loan for own” thing worked in the 19th century; it doesn't work so well in the 21st century. They have a terrible reputation for things like labor safety and environmental standards, and so if we just have a positive policy there and help create circumstances for investment, for foreign direct investment, I think we're going to go a long way to having African partners. That isn't just dependent on challenging the Chinese. We need not to make the mistake that we made in the Cold War, which is that the reason we wanted to be in the developing world was because the Soviet Union was in the developing world, and that led us to support all kinds of governments that were bad for their people. Could we not do that again just because we're trying to challenge the Chinese.

Source: “What Does America Stand For?” at 1:11:20. I have cleaned up the transcript a bit for readability’s sake.

Could we not do that again?

I’m pleased the US now considers Vietnam amongst its chief allies and partners, not least because I hope to be able to visit this unique and prospering country many times again in the future.

I started writing Pose Ponder (originally “The Daily Inchoate”) back in Nov 2023. I had a single goal: write. every. day. That experiment allowed me to start honing in on what I actually do tend to write about. I’ve become a believer in revealed preferences.

Pretty soon, I developed patterns for how my daily writing would work.

• I would write only on weekdays.

• I would post a weekly roundup (on Saturdays), so readers could have the option of getting one weekly email rather than five daily ones. (Only a couple people took advantage of this option — although it might be that the Substack setting is too obscure to find, to switch off one or the other.)

• I found I really needed a whole week off to attend to projects and read, so the publishing cadence became 3 weeks on, 1 week off.

• I fussed with different daily themes or quasi-templates, so that I knew what kind of post I would compose on a given day, and I would try to balance priorities (and reader preferences) across different types of content.

It’s been… pretty great, actually. Perhaps the best part has been meeting other writers here on Substack and engaging with their work. In a similar vein, I’ve begun showing up on Notes, Substack’s social media feed. Whether on the web or in the Substack app (it doesn’t work from one-way emails), by using Notes it’s possible to like, quote, re-stack, and comment on posts from all over Substack. I’ve enjoyed the share and muse: Pose and Ponder, hey!

But wow, is Substack an attention magnet. I’ve been “drawn in,” as Jane Austen writes in Pride and Prejudice. Lady Catherine de Bourgh scolds Jane for having caused Darcy to fall in love with her.

"This is not to be borne! Miss Bennet, I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?"

"Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible."

"It ought to be so; it must be so, while he retains the use of his reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in."

(Source: https://pemberley.com/etext/PandP/chapter56.htm)

I’m envisioning the 1995 BBC film version, where those last three words just hang in the air.

Breaking up, by travel, my months long daily stride of posting has sounded a wake-up call. As many wondrous things as there are to discover, read, like, quote, re-stack, and comment on Substack — along some few remaining things on the “rest of the Internet” (!) — the real book piles on my coffee and bedside tables are teetering. I need more time elsewhere.

I also have my Sojourners project to attend to — creating a community of practice for lifelong learners. It’s languishing!

To the end of spending less time on Substack, I had thought, simply, to reduce my weekly posting to three times a week, keeping two original(ish) essays and one combo curated post to aggregate findings (previously Mondays), engagement with other Substacks (previously Wednesdays), and resources (previously Fridays). This intention may still end up being the way forward.

But I’m also assessing my reading, research, and note-taking workflow on the backend. To my surprise, I realized some time ago that I often write first, doing whatever research on the fly as needed to compose a daily mini-essay, and then I have to back enter my writing into my permanent notes, my PKM (personal knowledge management system). And in reality, I don’t even get around to doing that back-entry. New day, new topic. On with the next thing. Yikes.

Revealed preferences… ?

Over the past ten months, I’ve covered a lot of ground at Pose Ponder, but the writing is still scattered. A key objective of trying to be a better human is to pull my addled wits together. Will a better organized PKM <cough> help with that? Writing more “intentionally”? Sheesh, I don’t know. Would I be able to write better if my wits were more pulled together. I would hope so!

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: my excuses for not having posted much since returning from Vietnam.

Permit me just a moment’s more lament.

I have notes/ideas on Vietnam that never rolled into a draft. I’m still intending to finish reading Agnes Callard’s Aspiration book, which relates not only to recent posts on travel, but also to the larger scope of Pose Ponder. What are the underlying difficulties with aspiration (as a human)?

As noted, my book pile is begging for me to both expand and deepen my personal canon and to write more on Arendt. and I will eventually finish up our Storythinking series, and we’ve been planning a new project, a collaborative reading of Dawn of Everything. Then there’s my ongoing dance around political thought (political theory, political philosophy) in more contemporary terms: a whole PPE adventure, much inflamed by the upcoming election and my efforts (in vain?) to sort out my vote.

A1, A2, A3, A4 … whatever happened to those distinctions, which are supposed to guide what’s going on here?

Not to mention, will I ever get brave enough to post more on political theology, on liturgy as counter-spectacle — as a possible antidote to the twisted relation between humans and creation; if such a thing could be done without going all apocalyptic and escapist? Gosh, I don’t know.

So you see, there’s a lot. Some of us have tortured brains.

If you’ve comments about any of the above, please share. You can’t imagine how writers like to hear back from their respected readers. Conversations are way better than monologues. (DMs are open, too.)

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An aspirational human is someone who wants to change — but doesn’t quite know the details of the new values he or she wants to embody. There is a desire present to assume a new identity, to become “someone else” (a better person), but knowledge is lacking, because you’re not already that person, who actually embodies the desired values. You’re in a paradoxical state.

In this interview with Adam Grant the psychologist, Callard starts off discussing the general difference between being motivated to change by ambition vs. by aspiration, but the conversation soon ranges much more broadly. It gives a good introduction to Callard’s approach to aspiration, to thinking, and to growing philosophically. (I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt, though I can find almost nothing relating the two philosophers.)

There is also Callard’s book on Aspiration, which I’ve now bought on Kindle (it’s been on my list for a while), and I’ll be reading it carefully. I’m interested in making sense of her broader philosophical framework not only for understanding her article against travel/tourism, but in the broader (and deeper) context of lifelong learning and in the context of “trying to be a better human in the Anthropocene.” Both are the aspirational goals of my writing here on Pose Ponder, and I don’t know exactly what either means. The whole point of writing is to put in practice my own lifelong learning and to figure out how to be a better human in the Anthropocene!

The key quote in “The Case Against Travel” is the following. To situate it a little, the paragraph follows one describing Callard’s experience of visiting a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi. As a tourist, she sees her visit as an “unchanged changer.” The “changer” part reflects her acknowledgment that tourists have an impact on the places they visit, potentially for the negative. But let’s focus on the “unchanged” part, because this is the core of Callard’s critique. People travel, ostensibly, to change or be changed by the experience, but they end up being “boomerangs,” who come back the same way they left. They don’t even really travel; they merely “locomote.”

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Unchanged changers don’t even try to learn! Before you protest that “Of course I learn when I travel, and I bet Agnes Callard did, too, when she visited the falcon hospital!” we’ll need to hunker down a little and unpack the philosophical framework — and deal with the role of delusion also, later.

It’s a bit subtle, but there’s a crucial three-way distinction going on in this paragraph, setting out Callard’s overall philosophy. At the beginning of the essay, Callard had made a distinction between traveling for a purpose, when you have “a reason to be somewhere,” like for work or study, and tourism, which is when a “temporarily leisured person voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” In the first case, a value (purpose) is well defined. In the second case, it’s not. Yes, there is a vague desire for “experiencing a change,” but it’s all too vague, and in the end, no change happens.

If Agnes had gone to Abu Dhabi with a deep passion for falconry already in place, it would have been travel for a clearly defined purpose. She might have enrolled in a falconry school and taken up residence in Abu Dhabi for a period of time in order to continue her education and deepen her well-explored passion. A second option is that she might have “approached the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction.” In this case, she might have aspired to be a falconer, but she didn’t really know what that entails. Callard leaves this second possibility all too vague herself. In the end, though, Agnes boomerangs, which is the third option. She visits the falcon hospital because “that is what one does in Abu Dhabi,” and she comes back home knowing her life will include “zero falconry.” She’s a mere tourist. She neither values, nor aspires to value, anything having to do with falconry. She has no desire, even tentatively, to take up any different future identity affected by the travel she’s done. She’s merely locomoting. No change occurs.

The three-way option is at the core of the whole essay, but in a fairly complicated way. Callard uses the quotations from Chesterton, Emerson, Pessoa, and (later) Walter Percy to make further points about aesthetics and ethics. These, note, are two of the five key categories of philosophical thought. The problem of not really knowing what one newly seeks out, which is central to the problem of aspiration, belongs in the category of epistemology.

I want to read the book and ponder some more within the context of my own larger projects of lifelong learning and trying to be a better human in the Anthropocene before writing more. But we definitely have a philosophy of travel going on here.

Confirmed.

Before concluding, it’s necessary to take up one further defining feature of the argument. It comes out clearly at the end that the underlying (epistemological) problem with tourists is that they’re delusional. They think they’re traveling for the sake of change, for personal growth, for enlarged knowledge of the world, for empathizing with other people and cultures, and so on — but in fact they don’t really change by the time they come home. And it’s not just about intent. It’s a long-standing delusion that is maintained even after return. Importantly, we don’t see the delusion in ourselves (we can’t judge in our own case), but we do see it in others. Delusion is a terribly unphilosophical attitude, it turns out, and it goes all the way back to the time of Socrates.

Socrates is the wisest person in Athens, recall, as the Oracle of Delphi said, not because he really knows so much, but because (as Socrates eventually has to figure out) he actually knows that he knows nothing. It’s a second level, reflective, “meta” kind of thing. Unlike just about everyone else, Socrates is wise because he knows that he doesn’t know. And yet… he wants to know. Socrates is a rare, genuinely aspirational human.

But Callard ends her essay with a different Socratic reference: “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death.” And she concludes: “For everyone else, there’s travel.” The two Socratic references are important, and they tie together. What’s the real problem of the delusion of tourists “seeking change”?

At the end of the essay Callard goes the next step from detecting delusion to considering why travelers (tourists) work so hard to maintain the delusion. The reason for the intransigence has to do with distraction. We’re invited to consider “how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel.” In that case, “the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as ‘More and more of this, and then I die.’” Part of the desire for travel, and the desire for change — though never realized — is the terror of dying without ever doing anything different, going anywhere, seeing anything.

Enter: the Bucket List!

IF we aren’t already “planning a major life change” at home — which would mitigate somewhat against the terrifying Ongoing This — we can accomplish an effective distraction by splitting and chunking time to the “before” and “after” of a trip, thus “obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.” Travel inoculates against the terror, but it doesn’t actually cure if we’re mere tourists. There is not only intransigent delusion, but active distraction. We don’t change through travel, and we don’t change at home, because we’ve convinced ourselves we’re already en route.

The practice of philosophy (at home) would be a Socratic response, knowing that we don’t know, wanting something we don’t yet understand, working toward genuine change. As preparation for death, aspirational philosophy responds to the terror of the inevitability of death coming after “more and more of this.”

For anyone else, who isn’t philosophical at home, there’s… travel. The delusional distraction.

But for me, there’s still an underlying question posed, which is: whether and how a person might travel and not be a mere boomerang, a mere locomotor, a tourist, delusional and distracted; whether and how travel can be made genuinely aspirational, genuinely philosophical in its own right.

As a discipline that has been practiced for a couple millennia, with a history and an account of itself and where it has been, Western Philosophy has defined a set of questions that define its scope: 1) What do we know and how can we know it, or epistemology. 2) What is reality and what is it comprised of, ontology or metaphysics. 3) How should we organize ourselves, politics. 4) How should we act, ethics. And 5) what is beauty, aesthetics. These are the five windows onto the world of Philosophy. Did we leave anything out?

From “What is Philosophy?” by at Philosophy Publics.

Instead of using these venerable categories, I talked about a philosophy of travel in terms of four things “to keep track of”: where, when, logistics, and learning before, during, and after. Re: the fourth thing, learning, I wanted to tie a philosophy of travel to a philosophy(?) of lifelong learning to a sought-after philosophy(?) for “how to be a good human in the Anthropocene.”

I’m not sure if the traditional categories of philosophy might need to be re-thought, given our new circumstances (Anthropocene → lifelong learning → travel), or whether I’m not seeing clearly how to use those traditional questions to answer present quandaries or accommodate new intuitions.

Ah, method.

Then today, I caught ’s post on whether or not it’s possible (or ethical?) to try to persuade other people to travel.

Those Who Wander

The Prospective Traveler: Encouraging Others to Wander

“Who wouldn’t travel, if they could? It’s unthinkable to me. Who wouldn’t want to enjoy different, new sensations, especially when the world is filled with so much great stuff? I like new things. I like to feel good. I like learning about stuff. It makes me happy. I like being wrong about stuff…

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2 years ago · 35 likes · 29 comments · Justin S. Bailey

Though he calls it a digression, he too believes travel is “one of the best forms of education” —

Travel is not for everyone and that is fine—I’ve come to accept that we don’t all have to value travel and adventure (as much as I think we should because it is one of the best forms of education). But I digress.

Justin doubles down on what is maybe the ultimate travel turn-off for many people, a kind of fear that has to be overcome. Elsewhere, he has already addressed problems of world travel in our present age (climate, overtourism, how to be a better traveler) — i.e. the properly ethical question.

Perhaps with this kind of thinking we are moving towards an actual legit philosophy of travel.

The intuition is confirmed when Justin links, in the “Prospective Traveler” post, to a yet earlier response he wrote to Agnes Callard’s “The Case Against Travel,” which was published in the New Yorker last year. Now Prof. Callard is one of my favorite philosophers at the University of Chicago, which also happens to be my alma mater. I attended there, and even majored in philosophy, at a sufficiently earlier date that I did not overlap with Prof. Callard at all. (How fun it would have been to take her classes!) In any case, I too had read her “Case Against Travel” and even wrote up some comments for myself about it. I’ve dug those out now and will ponder further before writing more.

I’ll leave you here, to go read these insightful people and consider your own reaction. Do you relate to Justin, who advocates wandering? To an ethical anti-traveler? To the North Carolina farmer? To Prof. Callard, whose philosophy centers on human aspiration, and who (thus?) laments lack of change amongst travelers?

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There is also — if you want to stretch your brain — the metaphysical/ontological problem of space/place, which has been tackling on her brilliant philosophy blog.

Or, if you’re of a more literary bent, perhaps magical realism holds a clue. See my little notes here and here, to start.

Immersing oneself in a different culture and life experience can definitely border on the “magical.” Travel easily touches on the surreal. You’re in another world but still the same “real” world.

Then go read on Murakami and the literary genre of magical realism, both excellent.

Travel for learning is all about the impact of (changing) place on (changing) you — in the context of a changing world, that needs to be changed yet further, but differently.

Given the geological-ecological-historical shift of the Anthropocene, for those humans that desire (aspirationally) to change for the better — while being subjected constantly to drastic (and anthropogenic) changes taking place beneath their very feet2 — what might they learn by setting their feet, or their imaginations, intentionally to wander elsewhere, to distant realms, whether real or fictional?

And what genuine fears might accompany them?

Tomorrow I fly back to the States after a couple weeks in the Philippines and Vietnam. Whenever I go abroad, it’s a welcome trespass against my boundary-identities, a personal test of endurance to be out of my comfort zone, and a realization of my determination to be open to the many and varied ways of living as a human on this planet. — And yet, people are people wherever you go. For the most part, they are lovely.

— I will except the two older gentlemen tricycle scammers who took us 3 blocks yesterday for VND ₫250,000 each (about USD $10), when they clearly said it would be ₫50,000. All part of the experience. Live and learn!

After leaving academia, I worked for a while as a wannabe travel advisor until I learned that most advisors book travel for Caribbean and Mexican resorts, including destination weddings, for luxury travelers via “FIT” (Flexible Independent Travel), or for inter-generational groups. I’m not a beach person, and while I’ve been on a few intergenerational bus tours in Europe with my extended family, these are not my preferred modes. I like slow travel, living as much as possible like a local, figuring out how to navigate public transportation, shopping and eating on a strict budget. Plus walking, walking, walking everywhere to get a sense of place and people.

I read up on history, geography, and culture. I love to browse street markets and bookstores. If I do touristy things, I prefer secondary or tertiary sites, or locations that domestic travelers themselves go.1 I travel to learn — and I want to learn to travel well. I have no real desire to collect “experiences” of places — just say No to bucket lists! My goal is to stretch to accommodate what’s around me, and to try hard to see beyond whatever’s become habitual and mundane at home.

After the pandemic, I was enthusiastic about the travel industry becoming more sustainable as it built back after collapse. The absolute best part of my short official stint in travel was that I learned a ton about the industry. For example, I was astonished to learn of the importance of travel, tourism, and hospitality for growing the economies of so many developing and developed countries alike. The statistics show something like 10% of global GDP — up to 70, 80, or 90% for some countries! — and 1 in 11 jobs worldwide.2 And yet, the quantity of resources consumed by western tourists is scandalous — water, energy, real estate — along with a concomitant generation of waste. Both overtourism and undertourism are massive global problems, quite apart from the carbon emissions of long haul air travel. Profits from tourism often go to national governments and to international hotel and tour groups, rather than to local or regional communities, which bear the brunt of infrastructure, employment, and environmental impacts. It’s true that roads and utilities may be improved, and tourist-focused restaurants, shops, and services do expand, offering training and work to locals. But as in so many industries, there is exploitation, and economic and educational benefits are not equitably distributed. Local cultures, neighborhoods, and ways of life are disrupted in the attempt to give tourists what they demand.

So what are some principles that might go to make up a philosophy of travel for lifelong learners?

It might be as simple — and flexible — as keeping track of four things.

Where?

Just as lifelong learners as readers gradually identify their favorite books, authors, and genres — their personal canon — savvy travelers gradually find their favorite countries, destinations, and neighborhoods, the places with which they “resonate” most and find themselves growing into, learning languages, geography, history, and cultural lifeways.

Perhaps special places come from one’s family, parents, or heritage. Maybe they are visited during one’s youth or college via backpacking or language learning. Sports interests, business opportunities, even religious commitments, direct one to parts of the world that can become like second homes if you let them.

Or maybe one’s special places are completely domestic, one’s home region!

Rather than seek to cover a world map with pushpins stuck into destinations worth barely a stopover, why not explore a given region or country thoroughly, getting to know it beyond superficialities?

What are your paradigm places? What’s your personal canon of places?

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When?

Finding time to travel well is a challenge for everyone with a full time job, especially if there is no opportunity to work remotely. Students, retirees, the self-employed, online entrepreneurs, digital nomads, tourism industry professionals, and the like all have many opportunities. But even people who are employed full time can take a travel sabbatical. Families with young or teenage children can consider world schooling for a year, a travel version of homeschooling. Expats, of course, work full time onsite but in a non-domestic location. It can be done!

Establishing a home base and exploring via day trips is recommended for savvy travelers who don’t want to be rushing around on an organized tour — or laying on a beach at a resort. There are numerous resources dedicated to a digital nomad lifestyle or slow travel. Travel bloggers can present a first glimpse to see what’s out there. Search based on desired destination, possibly adding “sustainable travel” as a modifier or a special interest such as history, architecture, environmental conservation. Do beware the “get rich quick” vibe of some of bloggers. You can also check out relevant Substacks, reddit channels, and expat communities.3

Logistics

Skylar at The Daily Grog published an insightful post today on his “suitcase algorithm,” concluding that serendipity — rather than an exhaustively researched and planned schedule — is the most valuable kind of travel for a well-heeled millennial. I’m not of the millennial generation, but I can understand the temptation toward staying at a trendy Airbnb and tasting one’s way around a city as a foodie. Cuisines and food cultures outside the US are well worth immersing in. Online travel tools make it possible to escape old-fashioned hotel and group tour-centric travel.

Figuring out travel logistics deserves several posts in its own right, and I won’t get into that here. A lot has to do with budget. Suffice to say it takes practice to figure out a travel style and pace that works for you. Returning to favored destinations makes everything much easier over time. I tend to plan minimally. I book major flights and a first week of lodging. I’ll research currency, mobile phone needs (charging and internet), climate-weather so I know what to pack, and the local transportation (subway, buses, taxi or car service). Short haul flights and intercity trains may need to be booked in advance, especially during national holidays or to reduce expense. Learning to use local apps is literally the ticket to efficient exploration.

I carry a water purifying bottle at all times. For my celiac condition, scoping out gluten free eating options is essential. Beyond that, I don’t do a lot of pre-planning. As mentioned, I start by walking, walking, walking around — and I happen upon everything of interest from there, keeping my phone in hand for maps, Google translate, and search. If you have even a few words of the local language, you can communicate surprisingly well: Hello, Thank you, Please, Excuse me.

Learning Before, During, After

Because I travel to learn and prioritize learning to travel better, most of my travel preparation centers around research and reading. I peruse maps, study geography, practice a few phrases (or go deeper and try to learn the language of my canonical places), and read history. Museums and major landmarks, including architectural monuments, take on greater significance if you have a sense of a people’s past. Browsing local and regional news helps get a sense of country politics, culture, and economics.

It’s impossible to get an authentic sense of a place until you actually go there, so educational travel sorts into three natural phases: before you travel, during your trip, and after you return home. Keeping a travel journal helps with remembering details later. After returning home, “re-entry” can be intense, especially if you’ve been traveling for a while. Don’t hesitate to give yourself mental and emotional space to process.

Today, in fact, I’m using my pre-departure day to start reflecting a bit before heading home.

3

For my current travel in Vietnam, I’ve learned so much from Brian at Postcards from Vietnam. Thank you!

Postcards from Vietnam

Postcards from Vietnam is about all of the interesting things which make Vietnam amazing as observed by a U.S. expat who is living in Vietnam.

You know how people say they need a vacation from their vacation? Well, I did the vacation first and now will be traveling for business and self-education. We lived in Manila for two years in the late 1990’s when our children were small, so the Philippines will not be a new experience. Back then we were able to explore the archipelago, including making several trips out to Negros Occidental province and the Gustilo family hometown of Manapla. On this trip, after a couple days in Manila, we’ll be returning to the province.

Vietnam, on the other hand, will be a first time visit for me. Before heading to the airport this evening I downloaded a couple history books, and I’ll be diving into Brian’s posts at:

Postcards from Vietnam

Postcards from Vietnam is about all of the interesting things which make Vietnam amazing as observed by a U.S. expat who is living in Vietnam.

I’m especially interested in the many recent biographical posts on Hồ Chí Minh. Since reading Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire, The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment, Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism I’ve become fascinated with learning more about the many leaders worldwide who sought self-determination for their people. So many intellectuals and revolutionaries were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s speeches — and then they were sadly disappointed at the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles.

Was Hồ Chí Minh disappointed enough to turn to Communism instead of allying with the west? Lenin had offered a hard critique of imperialism, and the Third International was happy to promote world communism. The Wilson Center, on the other hand, drawing on newly digitized archival sources, says, “No.” Hồ Chí Minh was already radicalized. Now I find myself on a bit of a mission to find out!

There’s much more to Vietnam today, of course, than the War and the country’s tragic 20th century history. Like the Asia tigers and as one of the cubs, since 1986 Vietnam has undergone a major economic renovation called the Đổi Mới, leading it to become a major developmental success story, despite remaining Communist.

We’ll be traveling mostly in the south on this trip and plan to explore, soak up the local culture, and eat!

Will keep you posted!

Consider the following analyses a little exercise in mastering English grammar. Too many elementary courses neglect the syntactical level of the clause and the compound, so that modern students never learn how to write with sufficient flexibility, much less correctness or rhetorical suspense.

Let’s consider a few periodic sentences to see how they work.

The Declaration of Independence

To start with something familiar, here’s the opening line (minus the dedication) of the Declaration of Independence.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

How and why is this a “periodic” sentence? “Period” means something like the “full statement,” continuing on until the period, the punctuation mark providing the definitive full stop.

Every sentence has a main clause. It may also have subordinate clauses. Subordinate clauses are either adjectival — meaning they modify nouns, answering the questions: which one, what kind, how many; or adverbial — meaning they modify verbs, answering the questions: when, where, why, how.

There can also be compounding, which is the simple multiplication of elements using and, but, or, yet, or a semi-colon (i.e. conjunctions).

Words and phrases (for example prepositional phrases), as well as subordinate clauses, can also be simpler modifiers, again either adjectival or adverbial.

What’s the main clause of the first sentence of the Declaration?

A decent respect requires (x).

where (x) is the direct object of the transitive verb “requires.” In this case, it is a noun clause, that is, a group of words that is basically a sentence in its own right (it has a subject and a verb), but it stands in for a single subject or object (a noun). The noun clause (x) is:

(that) they should declare the causes

Everything else in this sentence is a modifier, either adjectival or adverbial. The first great opening is an extended adverbial clause answering the question: when?

When does a decent respect require declaring the causes?

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them…

When? When it becomes necessary.

The “for” acts as a special kind of conjunction connecting another subordinate clause. That clause has the subject: “one people” and a compound predicate, with the verbs in this case taking infinitive form: to dissolve, to assume. Both are transitive verbs requiring direct objects: bands, station, respectively.1

(When it becomes necessary for) one people to dissolve the bands and to assume the station

Everything else is at yet another level of modification. We have simple adverbs or adjectives, or prepositional phrases, or relative clauses. Relative clauses are fairly easy to spot because they always include a relative pronoun (who, which, that), which refers back to an earlier noun in the sentence.2

• When (in the Course of human events) - prepositional phrases

• (political) bands (which have connected them with another) - adjective, relative clause

• to assume (among the powers of the earth) - prepositional phrases

• (separate and equal) station (to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them) - adjectives, relative clause

More modifiers fill out the main clause.

• (decent) respect (to the opinions of mankind) - adjective, prepositional phrases

• requires that they should declare the causes (which impel them to the separation) - relative clause

One could, of course, break down the relative clauses further in their respective components. But you get the idea.

Now, how is the sentence periodic? How is it not a complete sentence until the very end? Or, we might ask, at what point exactly does the period strictly close?

The key is: the main clause has to be complete.

If there is a transitive verb, the direct object must be given. Adverbial and adjectival modifiers of whatever form (words, phrases, subordinate clauses) don’t count, because modifiers can always, in theory, be left out. The sentence would be bare, but it would still have its base meaning.

The period closes at:

A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes.

It’s not quite at the very end, because there is that last modifier telling which causes: the ones “that impel them to the separation.”

Again, the whole opening is one giant adverbial clause modifier answering the question when. This is a common way to construct periodic sentences. Stack up a vast series of compounded adverbial clauses before you eventually arrive at the subject-verb-object of the main statement you want to make.

Check out the further examples below, then try writing some periodic sentences of your own!

Sarsparilla

Let’s try another one. This is from E.B. White (author of The Elements of Style). Given that manual’s preference for brevity and clarity, it’s striking that such a sentence appears in Stuart Little.

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

Can you find the main clause? Where does the period end? How are the modifiers — adjectival and adverbial clauses and phrases — working? What about compounding?

Here’s a hint. There is a giant four-fold compound on “where,” which is adverbial (it answers the question: where?). Compounds are easily found by parallelism.

The opening prepositional phrase “In the loveliest town of all” is a prepositional phrase with the prepositional object: town. It’s the town where (w), (x), (y), (z). After the four “where” clauses, White repeats: “in this loveliest of all towns” to draw the reader back. Then we have the main clause at the very end:

Stuart stopped to get a drink (of sarsparilla).

Two More

Now you can figure out these two.

Dylan Thomas, "A Child's Christmas in Wales"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare"

To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist.

Answers below.

(The White, Thomas, and Johnson examples are taken from ThoughtCo.)

Cicero

Besides the Victorian prose stylists, the ancient Latin writer Cicero (often known as “Tully”) was the grand master of the periodic sentence. Here’s a telling example from “TKR” on Stack Exchange’s Latin server, with more analysis at the link.

It’s taken from the Second Catilinarian.

Tandem aliquando, Quirites, L. Catilinam furentem audacia, scelus anhelantem, pestem patriae nefarie molientem, vobis atque huic urbi ferrum flammamque minitantem, ex urbe vel eiecimus, vel emisimus, vel ipsum egredientem verbis prosecuti sumus. Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.

C. D. Yonge's translation:

At length, O Romans, we have dismissed from the city, or driven out, or, when he was departing of his own accord, we have pursued with words, Lucius Catiline, mad with audacity, breathing wickedness, impiously planning mischief to his country, threatening fire and sword to you and to this city. He is gone, he has departed, he has disappeared, he has rushed out.

The English translation has rearranged the word order, and the period is not as evident. The main clause with compound verb is:

We have dismissed or driven out or pursued (with words) Lucius Catiline.

The transitive verbs require the direct object. In the Latin, the direct object Lucius Catiline comes at the very beginning, as if to say “Lucius Catiline… (that rascal)… (we) have dismissed, driven out, pursued.”3 All the adjectival modifiers on Catiline, in participial form, apply directly back to him and are given immediately following, all at the beginning. The listener is given up front the full justification for why the action is taken.4

L. Catilinam furentem audacia (mad with audacity), scelus anhelantem (breathing wickedness), pestem patriae nefarie molientem (impiously planning mischief to his country), vobis atque huic urbi ferrum flammamque minitantem (threatening fire and sword to you and to this city)…

The completion of the main clause then comes at the very end, with the subject (“we”) and the compound verbs dismissed, driven out, pursued.

One other interesting note. In ancient Greek and Latin, pronouns are usually included in the verb, so that a separate subject is not necessary.5 For example, in the second sentence in the passage, in Latin we have “Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit” meaning: “He is gone, he has departed, he has disappeared, he has rushed out.” You probably know another famous example: “Veni, vidi, vici” is translated “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Thus in Latin, the period is not complete until the very end:

Ex urbe vel eiecimus, vel emisimus, vel (ipsum egredientem) verbis prosecuti sumus.

Literally, Lucius Catiline (he it is that, him) “from the city (we) have dismissed, or driven out, or (when he was departing of his own accord), with words have (we) pursued.”

The Greatest Period Ever

Finally, here is one of the greatest periodic sentences I have ever seen. It’s from St John of Damascus, from the opening (ch. 1) of his tale of Barlaam and Ioasaph. This is an English translation of the original Greek.6

Two shorter sentences open.

THE country of the Indians, as it is called, is vast and populous, lying far beyond Egypt. On the side of Egypt it is washed by seas and navigable gulphs, but on the mainland it marcheth with the borders of Persia, a land formerly darkened with the gloom of idolatry, barbarous to the last degree, and wholly given up to unlawful practices.

But when ‘the only-begotten Son of God, which is in the bosom of the Father,’ being grieved to see his own handiwork in bondage unto sin, was moved with compassion for the same, and shewed himself amongst us without sin, and, without leaving his Father’s throne, dwelt for a season in the Virgin’s womb for our sakes, that we might dwell in heaven, and be re-claimed from the ancient fall, and freed from sin by receiving again the adoption of sons; when he had fulfilled every stage of his life in the flesh for our sake, and endured the death of the Cross, and marvellously united earth and heaven; when he had risen again from the dead, and had been received up into heaven, and was seated at the right hand of the majesty of the Father, whence, according to his promise, he sent down the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, unto his eyewitnesses and disciples, in the shape of fiery tongues, and despatched them unto all nations, for to give light to them that sat in the darkness of ignorance, and to baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost—whereby it fell to the lot of some of the Apostles to travel to the far-off East and to some to journey to the West-ward, while others traversed the regions North and South, fulfilling their appointed tasks—then it was, I say, that one of the company of Christ’s Twelve Apostles, most holy Thomas, was sent out to the land of the Indians, to preach the Gospel of Salvation.

Answers:

Thomas: “It snowed and it snowed.” Years and years ago, when…, when…, when… (we sang and wallowed and chased), before…, before…, before…, when…, it snowed and it snowed.

Johnson: (x) is the business (of the modern dramatist). (x) is a compound subject built of six infinitive phrases: To (a); to (b); to (c); to (d); to (e); to (f) is the business. The semi-colons give it away.

Do you have a favorite sentence you’d like to share? How about posting a periodic sentence you wrote yourself! 😎

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From Middle English apocalips, from Latin apocalypsis, from Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis, “revelation”), literally meaning "uncovering", from ἀπό (apó, “back, away from”) and καλύπτω (kalúptō, “I cover”).

The sense evolution to "catastrophe, end of the world" stems from the depiction of such events in the biblical Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse of (i.e. Revelation to) John.

Source: Wiktionary

The literal meaning is to uncover or “reveal.” Compare the Greek aletheia, which means literally to un-forget. (The Lethe is the river in Hades, which when one crosses it at death, one enters oblivion.) Both are truth-terms, knowledge terms, not metaphysical ones having to do with a changing structure of reality, involving destruction, catastrophe, End. The evolution of sense of the word, adding the latter connotation is due to the revelation to John in the Bible. The content of what was revealed to John was the End.

Apocalypticism as a religious or political or ecological movement is about “seeing” (wrongly, in my view) that “the End is nigh.” It’s accompanied by a fevered admonishment to anyone who will listen: “if you don’t reform your ways immediately!” That is, the seer sees and wills the other to conform. There is so extreme a degree of self-surety and self-righteousness involved as to be unquestioning of self and unquestionably condemnatory of another, whoever is deemed to be at fault.

Anti-Trump apocalyptic

Anti-Deep State apocalyptic (Anti-liberal, Anti-Democrat)

Anti-Climate Change apocalyptic

War apocalyptic

Race, gender, ethnic apocalyptic

Economic apocalyptic (“growth or else”; “degrowth or else”)

The problem with all of these is that when all is Absolute Crisis, any means becomes justified and necessary to stop the threat. At all costs. And that, in itself, is also apocalyptic, in the bad sense.

In the Absolute, at the End, it is too late for talking. No more discussion. No more speaking. No more listening. No more waiting patiently. No more debate. No more argument. The apocalyptist knows she is utterly and absolutely right, and poised at the juncture of dire peril to existence, to reality, to sanity. It will be the End if one is not heard, believed, and obeyed.

Except the problem is… reasonable people — to the extent there are any left, and I believe there are many, many left (although they may be all too silent) — do differ. This is a sign that we are not in fact in the apocalypse. Where reasonable differences remain — where difference can still be accepted as reasonable — we have not yet entered the Totality that justifies terrorism against the Enemy, whoever They are.

To avoid the apocalypse, to avoid the Totality, is to respect as wide a range of reasonable difference as humanly possible, even when it seems unreasonable to you.

If people were really afraid of apocalypse, they would not create apocalypse. They would hold defiantly onto a classical liberal middle. This is why defenders of that thread-worn early modern arrangement still exist today.

If people were really afraid of apocalypse, they would shift to the other meaning of the term and seek “revelation,” enlightenment, the uncovering of reality from the overlay of catastrophic emotion. Let go the anger, fear, and passions run amok.

Now I grant that it’s possible that situations can become so dire — as they did multiple times in the 20th century, and possibly at many other points in history — that we really do start to live in the Totality, where reason, thought, freedom, speech, action, life itself, personhood itself, humanity, nature — are all in actual danger of destruction.

It may be that talk, talk, patiently waiting, listening, discussion, toleration becomes an excuse, a brainwash, a fatal delay, a pandering to the evil afoot in the world. Even so, to stop thinking, to stop listening, to be so assured that one demonizes the other and cancels the Enemy, is to practice (anti-)apocalypse. Better to move to action and continue to think, speak, wait, persevere, be patient, be hopeful, and look for and believe in the best of everyone.

Come what may.

First, my apologies for coming back into your inbox a day later than intended. I was traveling back from Florida after a weekend visit with my 92yo father. He’s doing pretty well! I had thought to write a quick note from my sardine seat en route and post from the Dallas airport on layover, but some inflight conversation with a delightful young woman trying to figure out her educational trajectory intervened, plus I got to spend time with my youngest daughter, as we traveled together part of the way. The person in front of me gets top focus!

Truancy will undoubtedly continue over the next month, since my husband and I have a real vacation(!) lined up starting next week, and then I’m off to Asia with my oldest daughter to inspect the family compound in the Philippines. We then detour over to Vietnam for a first-time visit. I am not going to be visiting South Korea on this trip, my go-to in Asia. As always, travel will be 100% educational, and I’ll have things to share, but I can’t anticipate what it will be in advance.

Speaking of go-to travel destinations, what are yours? Alongside your personal canon of books, where are your canonical Places on earth?

It needn’t be anywhere exotic. Don’t we choose to live, if possible, in our most special place? Please share.

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My big project besides writing is the Sojourners community of practice dedicated to lifelong learners on a mission. It’s slowly ramping up to a very soft launch. I’m adapting Pondercraft techne to be available to all serious readers, writers, travelers, and “TLCs” (teachers, leaders, coaches). If this sounds intriguing, you can put your name on the list.

Finally, my intensive class on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition has finished. I am left slightly exhausted and perplexed, but also with a much greater understanding of her thought. In this book, Arendt has thought what we are doing (literally, our human activity) like no other before or since. Thank you, for leading the 20 or so intrepid souls who took the journey with you.1

I’ll leave you with this quote from the book. It might become the epigraph for the Sojourners community:

The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.

Source: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, section 7 on “The Public Realm: The Common,” p. 55

“Until soon,” as Sam says.

My class on Arendt’s The Human Condition continues, and this week I had a quasi-meltdown as to whether my mission here at Pose Ponder makes any sense. Monday’s Findings drew a lot of traffic, and Anne of Green Places provided welcome consolation. :)

Next installment reading with Dan: Storythinking, ch. 6.

Do you know anyone who might be interested in Pose Ponder? Please share! 😎

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For Index No. 6, following on from recent Arendt study, the theme is an old series on Arendt’s “Gospel” from Christmas-New Years 2023-24.

For those who are sick of hearing about Arendt, Arendt, Arendt, I’m adding three other past favorites — and, in relation to one of them, I’m sneaking in one more post on Arendt! (Bwahaha)

Have a great break and see you in a week.

P.S. — On Saturday mornings, per usual, you’ll get a round-up of the past week.

Arendt’s “Gospel”

First, there is an introductory quote I’m working from. You’re invited to read it and ponder first.

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

(Source: The Human Condition, p. 247, conclusion of Chapter V “On Action”)

Then I wrote a series of three posts commenting on it:

More Favorites

And sneaking in one more Arendt post, to read with Backward, Forward, Sideways:

Political Animal

Share your thoughts, comments, or suggestions?

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The Anthropocene is that kind of thing.

Arendt is also, especially in her work on The Human Condition, preoccupied with humanity as such. She’s not about human nature or about “natural law” or some “natural rights” that define, regulate, limit (control, manage?) human beings, as are other political thinkers. She’s exploring the conditions (I think they are like Kantian conditions of possibility) that are given to humans, that allow them to appear, at all, as such. What are the fundamental circumstances, given by earth (nature), given by the “world” (technical term, consisting of the places and things of human artifice), that form the reality in and by which humans come into the world, sojourn through it, and leave something behind so that their mortal lives are not entirely futile, managing merely to preserve the species, as do animals?

Along with the conditions of human life, Arendt gives attention to human activity, the vita activa, and to human thought, the vita contemplativa, bringing the two together and not separating them out into “those who do” and “those who think.” We must think what we are doing.

She gives attention also to place and to the worldly artifacts, institutions, conventions, and realms that provide “spaces of freedom.” Knowing that freedom requires more than mere liberation, more than revolution (violence, destruction), Arendt understands that places offer stability and security in order to have genuine freedom, both individually and collectively. How free are you if your life is fundamentally insecure? Arendt experienced placelessness and homelessness first hand.

What happens when you put the conditions, activities, and places together? What happens if a break in history is fundamentally dehumanizing, having completely disrupted these three? What if the Anthropocene (so-called, and for good reason!) has led to circumstances where humans have fundamentally escaped their earthly/worldly conditioning and their most basic activities of labor, work, and action, along with thought as we know it? What happens if humans have lost or even destroyed the private and public spaces provided for these activities? What if we’ve become no longer human in any recognizable fashion?

How is such a state of affairs even to be called the Anthropocene?

My stated mission of “trying to be a good human in the Anthropocene” might be totally undermined, if I take Arendt seriously.

This new age, understood via Arendt’s techne, may be the age of humans having escaped their humanity. However much sense the term Anthropocene makes on some level, clearly our species (whatever it now is) and our activities (whatever they now are) and our economic, social, and political spaces (such as they now are), have created planetary change at enormous scale and magnitude, beyond comprehension.

Already in the late 1950’s when Arendt was writing The Human Condition, reflecting on the rise of the tools and technologies (“instrumentality”) of the modern age, she worried about how human activities had already gone so far as, effectively, to reverse the fabrication process that had allowed humans to make a relatively isolated, artificial world within nature, but more or less “walled off” from it, a world highly useful for our own safety and purposes. Taking material from the world, “killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them” — “decoupling” ourselves, as the Breakthrough people put it — homo faber used to keep its activities confined to labor and to work, world-making on a human scale. No longer.

As technology develops, humans start channeling natural processes into the human artifice and world. As technology develops even further, we can even channel it back out to the “household of nature” itself. No longer do the earth, and the world as we knew it from previous generations, give to and condition us. Whatever/whoever we’ve become, whatever it is we’re now doing, now we are the ones “giving” back and “conditioning” back to the earth itself, completely throwing over all prior contiguous worlds.

In one passage in particular from The Human Condition, where Arendt is discussing the “main stages of modern technology’s development since the beginning of the modern age” (HC p. 148-153), she steps through each, passing from the age of the steam engine, still relatively contiguous, then electricity, then automation (machine manufacturing), and finally the nascent atomic age. Referring to the transition from electricity to automation and machine manufacturing, Arendt says that we have begun to “create.”1

Today we have begun to “create,” as it were, that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against natural elementary forces, keeping them as far as possible outside the man-made world, we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself. (148-149)

No more decoupling. At this stage, humans have unchained (from nature) and harnessed natural processes sufficiently to channel them into the world itself.

From this brave, new world, it becomes possible, next, to reach back out to effectively re-create earth and nature. The scale becomes planetary, even universal.

Instruments of nuclear technology… if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth, present sufficient evidence for the enormous scale on which such a change might take place. Here it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists. If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future techniques will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice. (149-150)

So present technologies, at the time of Arendt’s writing, at the earliest stage of the Great Acceleration, were channeling natural processes into the artificial human world — rather than, as of old, there being (tiny) human worlds carved out from nature, literally walled off places where humans could protect themselves from raw and dangerous untamed energies and forces. Present technologies, then, harnessed those forces and brought them into human worlds.

Future technologies, as Arendt foresaw, based on the nascent nuclear case, extending back out into nature, will work at enormous scale, affecting all organic life on earth. Foreshadowing such a future, mid-20th century physicists were capable in laboratories of “handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe.” Arendt predicted that those “universal forces” may yet “be channeled into the nature of the earth” itself, transforming “the household of nature as we have known it.” We in the 21st century, given our vantage point 65 years on, can add to Arendt’s “universal” forces: climate change, mass extinction, reversals of glaciation and polar ice, sea level rise and ocean current reversal, re-jigging chemical and hydrological cycles, triggering seismic events2 — as well as, of course, elementary physical particles unleashed, computer networks and algorithms autonomously surveillant and globally interlinked, and emergent AI. Nothing humans do is constrained any longer to laboratories, mines, farms, factories, cities, or any other geographic space remaining under close human scrutiny and management.

If the conditions of possibility of human life, throughout all history and pre-history, obliged us to labor, to work to fabricate limited artificial human worlds, to practice excellence and politics in a public realm, yet now we have fundamentally changed all those “givens,” are we even human anymore?

To be sure, it need not be a question of nature, of “technically” whether or not we are still human. But such fundamental change, on such enormous scale, does question whether anything as we know it makes sense any longer.

Basic life parameters set by earth, and set by a limited human-made world, into which we have always been born, have always conditioned us. But now we’re including literally everything within the realm of what we ourselves — now — create, ex nihilo as it were. Nothing is given. The only conditions left are those we create entirely anew.

It’s as if we were to occupy an alien planet and start over.

The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their “nature” is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made… (HC p. 10)

Humans will never escape being “conditioned beings” (as such), but all activity, all thought, all places, all actual conditions under which humans have ever lived, could utterly change — have, in the Anthropocene, utterly changed. “Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer.” No more earth, no more durable world of places and things, into which we are born to stabilize and secure worldly sojourns, no more continuity of history or thought, no more fabricated tools, tables, temples, walls to delimit and structure private and public realms, securing families and political collectives away from raw and dangerous nature. Not even art or poetry will there be in any recognizable fashion, to recount glorious or excellent or beautiful words and deeds of humans past who made their mark.

We don’t have to emigrate to some other planet to experience life as everything is “self-made.” We have already transformed our present planet, not quite to our specifications.

Technically, by “nature,” we are still human.

Technically, the earth, the world, the planet we have now wrought and “live” in, is still the earth, world, and planet that wrought us, that made us the beings we are.

But in Arendtian terms, does it even really make sense any more to ask about, to pose and ponder about, being good humans in this Anthropocene?

Anne of Green Places

I write my way through the nooks and crannies of the natural+human world - currently in Grenoble, France, gateway to the French Alps. Place, history, ecology, art.

By Anne Thomas

P.S. The fledglings have fledged! 🥰 🐦‍⬛

Wise nuggets of pop epistemology appear all the time on our social feeds and apparently they have great appeal, going by the number of likes and shares. I’m thinking of all those philosophy quotes, proverbs, sayings about how not to become too biased or ideological, appeals to “mental models,” and so on. I approve that they are aimed at generalists rather than specialists, non-experts rather than experts. I agree that they seem to embody lots of pragmatic common sense. Sometimes they really do pithily capture obvious life experience (readerly experience, political experience, social experience). They do tend to lack substance, i.e. real content subject matter. They propose method without application. That could be a little worrisome. They also, if you can relate to them, tend to self-affirmation. “Hey, that’s a wise saying. I’m so glad I think that way, too.” Confidence-building is a tricky thing.

A question for today is whether wisdom nuggets can really help curb cognitive chaos, for example when you’re trying to work through difficult ideas in a high-stakes environment, or when you’re a non-expert trying to get a handle on one or more sub-familiar fields. “Okay, I’m a non-expert, but it seems important that I should get a grasp on this for the sake of being a more responsible voter, citizen, human.” I get that one shouldn’t “have an opinion on everything” — especially a pseudo-expert opinion — but I’ll dare say, most things of common concern shouldn’t be left to the experts. (I don’t say that glibly. I hope it gives you pause.)

So today, as I sit here in some cognitive chaos, I’ll repeat my principles to myself. You may listen in on my self-talk (only if you want to).

I’d love to hear what works for you, too.

Leave a comment

Open

Someone very close to me regularly evokes from me the (sometimes screaming) accusation, “You always have everything all figured out!” And of course he does not always have everything figured out. But he thinks he does. Some people need to operate, apparently, with tightly closed sets of beliefs and commitments. Maybe their life is hard (not the case here), and they need sureties to keep on trucking. Or maybe they are maladroit at managing the emotions that come with cognitive chaos (probably the case here), especially when one needs to perform.

For me, though, openness is essential, as a lifelong learner. I’m just never going to be “done, sorted.”

Integrity

That said, integrity of thought, emotion, and action is necessary for me to hold it together, to manage the emotions. I’m just not smart enough to be two-faced, to “play” (play off) variant forces by being all things to all people, or saying what everybody wants to hear — or doing what everybody wants to do. A mode like that is too complicated for me.

Probably I try to be a bit too independent and try too hard figure it out (over and over and over) for myself. Actually I’m open to most sensible input. But I have to reserve the right to see how it all “fits” before the penny drops.

I thus adhere strongly to coherence and revelatory models of truth.2 Stuff has to hang together, and I need to “see” it. The picture is always fuzzy around the edges and regular blurs until I squint it back into some semblance of clarity. It then needs to hold shape for a while. Getting stability, for me, generally requires talking.

Techne

What would be “sensible” input? How to measure? It’s input that I can apply a model to, a framework for understanding, a techne.

The more subject areas I learn to some non-expert level of minimal competence, the more I understand that each has its own techne — from the Greek, meaning art or craft; the basis of our modern technology. A working definition of techne for me is “a framework of knowledge and practice.” There’s knowledge (more or less acceptable, verified), and there’s application or practice. It’s organized into a framework. It helps make sense of chaos.

Techne (I’ll use the same word for an anglicized plural form) are sort of like the faddish “mental models,” but they are less generic. They are methods developed for particular subject areas. They tend to come from the most immersed, reflective, and insightful practitioners-cum-theorists — like Ms. Arendt.

In an open search for integrity, techne are my tools.

Evolving

But techne aren’t static, either. One needs an openness to new techne (yes, add the meta level) and to extending one’s grasp of existing and familiar frameworks. The best techne are not quite fathomable all the way down, at least for non-experts.

Mash-ups across techne, combining techne, is one of the most productive ways for me to resolve cognitive chaos. This is a plug for being a generalist — even as techne themselves are generally subject-area specific. Wisdom comes from not being too narrow and playing/performing with only one framework. Imposing an ideology on the world skews the world (for you).

What’s that saying? (Here we go…)

Not everything is a nail, just because you have a hammer.

Personal Canon

Want to evolve your techne? Want to merge some? Develop a personal canon of the best practitioner-theorists, the ones who help you see. They don’t need to be right, scientifically. They need to see things and communicate what they see in a meaningful and useful fashion. Techne are tools, technologies. They help hold it together, at least temporarily.

What techne offer should be constructive, generalist-applicable but not substance-less, subject matter-less. The best theorists are not destructive, except perhaps in a creative-destructive way, as they criticize what went before — the history, the backstories (as they see them), of which they have significant knowledge, admiration, appreciation. But they draw upon the past, as in re-constellating fragments. Gathering the bits and pieces up, they push forward into the new.

Right now, Hannah Arendt is my seer-theorist of choice. I’m learning her techne and trying to mash things up. The cognitive chaos should clear soon.

Other posts come to mind:

How to Read a Great Book

Life Balance