Regardless of centuries of discovery, many prefer hearsay to science-say. 
 
Having been to the moon, circled it, and even landed and driven upon it, humans can say with some considerable certainty that it’s a desolate place, void of both a life-sustaining atmosphere and a population of multicellular indigenous life-forms. Maybe, somehow in some crater, the moon houses bacteria or viruses, but that possibility remains a mere speculation based on such scant evidence as a Russian cosmonaut’s claim of finding bacteria of unknown origin on the hull of the International Space Station.* Shame, isn’t it. All that speculation for centuries about moon men and all those early science fiction movies with an indigenous race of creatures like H. G. Wells’ Selenites of First Men in the Moon. All for naught. But the speculation has been fun, and maybe it was a centuries-long buildup of expectation that motivated Goddard and other rocket scientists to tweak their inventions toward practicality and discovery. Today, we search for life on Mars, and we continue to search the heavens for planets in the Goldilocks zones of other star systems.
 
Yes, we’ve been at this life-on-other-worlds speculation for centuries, at least since 1638 to be precise when John Wilkins published The Discovery of a World in the Moone. And Wilkins admits he was not the first to speculate about life “out there,” particularly on the moon: “Many ancient Philosophers of the better note, have formerly defended this assertion, which I have here laid downe….”** Imagine. A seventeenth century Englishman pondered whether or not there was life elsewhere. And this within a decade of Galileo’s house arrest by the Inquisition for simply pointing out that Earth orbits the Sun. Talk about political incorrectness; it was also 54 years before the Salem Witch Trials. Saying or publishing something unacceptable could get one torched in those days.
 
Nevertheless, Wilkins boldly offered his speculation in 13 propositions. It’s his first proposition that might strike us as applicable to our times. “That the strangenesse of this opinion is no sufficient reason why it should be rejected, because other certaine truths have beene formerly esteemed ridiculous, and great absurdities entertained by common consent.” Go ahead; speculate; you might be on to something. In other words, go ahead; say it; it doesn’t matter how preposterous or unsubstantiated your statement is; just say it. Hey, maybe someone will prove you to be correct, just as Galileo proved Copernicus and Columbus proved Eratosthenes to be correct.  
 
Among Wilkins’s other propositions is “the Moone is a solid” (Proposition 4), the moon has continents and seas (Propositions 7 and 8), and “that tis probable there may be inhabitants in this other World, but of what kinde they are is uncertaine” (Proposition 13).
 
Although it is true that the “strangenesse” of an opinion is “no sufficient reason why it should be rejected,” it is also true that unsubstantiated opinions are not facts. Often, proponents of strange opinions are usually not taken seriously by their peers if the opinions affect personal beliefs, and definitely they are almost never taken seriously by “authorities”; but there are exceptions. That a plesiosaur swims in Loch Ness or that lights in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona, are alien spacecraft are two examples of unsubstantiated “strangenesse” with a host of believers. And you can probably think of many other examples. Ever see the TV series about “ancient aliens”?
 
We live in a time when John Wilkins would find not only avid readers, but also a cult of followers for his propositions about the moon. Are we in an age when the stranger the opinion, the more adherents it gathers like some bar magnet in a sea of iron filings?
 
Here we are approaching fifty years since Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, and we still have people with strange opinions that defy what we have learned not only since the time of Copernicus and then Galileo, but also from the time of Eratosthenes, the guy who gave a rather accurate measurement of Earth’s circumference just by measuring the angles of a couple of widely separated shadows. Fifty years of recent high-tech science backed by centuries of observations and experiments yet still the strangest unsubstantiated ideas persist.
 
One of those ideas is that Earth is flat, an idea held by people like Mike Hughes, the builder of a rocket he designed to fly 1,800 feet above the Mojave Desert. Hughes insists the round Earth is a disk, rather than an oblate spheroid all those photos and some pretty good mathematicians and scientists have determined.*** Think now. He has invested time and money to rise eighteen hundred feet to prove his world is flat. Is there something in the man’s mind that prevents him from going a bit higher, say, in a commercial jet at 35,000 to 45,000 feet. I think Mike spent tens of thousands of dollars on his project. Airline tickets are cheaper.
 
Well, as of this writing, Hughes’ effort is on hold. Shame. I really wanted to resolve this round-Earth/flat-Earth thing that has weighed so heavily on so many minds. And maybe Mike Hughes, while he’s up there on some even higher flight path, might be able to resolve the lights-in-the-sky problem. Or maybe he could go to the moon to see whether or not it houses Selenites.
 
What is it about the contemporary mind that makes it refuse to accept demonstrable realities in favor of speculations run wild. Is it laziness? Is it mere gullibility, as “they” might say, “run wild”? Is there an unjustified hopefulness that all opinions great or small will someday bear the weight of substantiation?
 
And what in your (or my) brain is analogous? What mere and strange speculation governs belief and behavior while we wait for substantiation? Is it possible that even sophisticated twenty-first century scientists have their own version of a flat Earth? Think “string theory” and "string theorists." There’s no experiment yet that can verify the "theory," but there are many physicists whose careers hang on those strings. Are they like Wilkins or Hughes? Isn’t that ironic: Scientists holding onto a strange opinion in hopes that since other opinions have been verified theirs will someday also be verified. 
 
The narrator of that series on ancient aliens often makes reference to UFO experts and ancient alien researchers, often without naming one specifically—unless it’s Erich Anton Paul von Däniken, author of  Chariots of the Gods. Today, there seems to be little danger in speculation that contradicts archaeology, astronomy, physics, geology, and chemistry. Since so many hold the notion that science isn’t ultimately verifiable because scientists have continued to refine what we know on different levels of resolution, no strange opinion is off limits. No Inquisition is around to torch a speculator no matter how unsubstantiated the speculation. For many, a round Earth is just an opinion. Almost anything goes; one just has to propose a strange speculation to get attention, followers, a book, or even a TV program.

Looking for a flat Earth, Selenites, Loch Ness monsters, strings, or ancient aliens? No belief turns speculation into fact.
 
 
*Webb, Sam. The Sun. November 28, 2017. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5012312/international-space-station-astronauts-bacteria-not-from-earth/
 
**Wilkins, John. The Discovery of a World in the Moone. London. Michael Sparl and Edward Forrest, 1638. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19103/19103-h/19103-h.htm
 
*** http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/technology/ct-flat-earth-rocket-20171122-story,amp.html

What’s lacking? What’s wanted? But what, indeed, is needed?
 
Desire derives from not having as much as it derives from wanting. But what is lacking or wanted that we need? Material goods accumulating to wealth? What of human connections?
 
Maybe the desideratum that is most important to humanity is that which connects us. Here’s a practical example: In October, 1884, in Washington, D.C., representatives from a number of countries met for an international conference “For the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day.” What’s the big deal? Who cares about “fixing” a Prime Meridian, anyway? What was so important about location and time-reckoning?
 
After being elected President of the conference, Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers made an opening point and an argument to justify the conference: The point? “Happy shall we be, if, throwing aside national preferences and inclinations, we seek only the common good of mankind, and gain for science and for commerce a prime meridian acceptable to all countries….”*
 
Now, you might still be wondering about this if you didn’t have a geography class (or ignored the one you took). The Admiral then justified the purpose of the conference, “In my own profession, that of a seaman, the embarrassment arising from the many prime meridians now in use is very conspicuous, and in the valuable interchange of longitudes by passing ships at sea, often difficult and hurried, sometimes only possible by figures written on a black-board, much confusion arises, and at times grave danger [italics mine]. In the use of charts, too, this trouble is also annoying, and to us who live upon the sea a common prime meridian will be a great advantage.”
 
Captains (and admirals) need to know where they are as they sail, but the indistinguishable swells and whitecaps of an open ocean have no obvious markers. That’s a problem because much of the world’s goods go from port to port, and many ships cross paths.
 
Today, we all agree that a north-south line running through Greenwich, England, serves as the Prime Meridian, the line that divides the Eastern Hemisphere from the Western Hemisphere. We use it for the basis of east-west designations and, importantly, for calculating hours by 24 fifteen-degree units around the 360-degrees of our spherical planet. So, deciding on a Prime Meridian gives the world a unified scheme for telling time and for pinpointing location on a spherical grid, the graticule (in conjunction with the indisputable Equator that separates the mirrored latitudes of Northern and Southern Hemispheres).   
 
Back to that nineteenth century desideratum. In filling their mutual desire for a common Prime Meridian, the conference members provided a reference all could know and use not only for location, but also for synchronizing the activities of widely separated people. And even though they could not anticipate jets and flight paths in their agreement, they also provided the means for air navigation and departure and arrival times. They established the basis for a standard clock, made GPS workable, and even prevented accidents in vehicles they probably never imagined. In establishing a single Prime Meridian, they filled a gap in human connectivity.
 
Now what do we desire beyond that connectivity? Or what do we need? We have a common physical reference that unites us in time and space. But what of emotions and ideas?
 
Could we use an international conference on our other arbitrarily chosen references? Is there some common reference we could use for connecting? Some “prime” reference on which all of humanity could rely—even if arbitrarily chosen—for unity and for ideological and emotional navigation?
 
Maybe no common desideratum for human connectivity exists. The gaps among humans are unfillable. You have your desires. So-n-So has hers. I have mine. We are admirals navigating by graticules of our own choosing, possibly sharing only some indisputable Equator like DNA and phylum, but never sharing a prime reference for emotion and idea. We still find ourselves in danger of accidents along our crossing life-paths. Should we assume that unlike a worldwide navigational and temporal system based on a Prime Meridian, no analogous ideological or emotional common reference is possible?
 
During that 1884 conference some attendees disagreed with the consensus. They did so for various reasons. Professor Janssen, France’s delegate, addressed the conference with this: “…it is evident that we must first decide the question of principle which is to govern all our proceedings; that is to say whether it is desirable to fix upon a common zero of longitude for all nations” (p. 26). Not everyone, it seems, was onboard the ship sailing to agreement.
 
So, you have to ask with Janssen whether or not a conference to establish a common reference for idea and emotion is desirable? If there were countries in the nineteenth century that lacked a desire to find a common reference point on Earth’s surface that would prevent “confusion” and “grave danger” (in the words of Admiral Rodgers), how could we get agreement on other mechanisms for human connectivity?
 
What do we desire? Obviously, as evidenced by our continued interpersonal and international “confusion” and “grave danger,” we haven’t found some common reference. Is it because we don’t want one?
 
*International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. Protocols of the Proceedings. Washington, D. C. Gibson Bros., Printers and Bookbinders, 1884. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm#Page_1
 
 
  

South Australia has a new battery, a really big one at 100 MW, and that’s enough to power 30,000 homes to keep people cool in the region’s blistering summer heat. Built by Tesla for storing wind-generated power, the battery went from planning to contract to completion in a phenomenally short time. In response to Mike Cannon-Brookes, another billionaire, Elon Musk said Tesla would build the battery in 100 days or the approximately $50 million battery “would be free.” Tesla met the deadline; in fact, it beat it.*
 
That’s the nature of entrepreneurial thinking. Given any challenge, just say, “Yes.” Given any problem, just say, “I can solve it.” True, any entrepreneur might fail—and many have—but there’s no getting things done the slow way, the sheepish way, or the bureaucratic way that has any better record of accomplishment. Probably, were we to run a check, we would find that the cautious way has a greater record of failure and definitely a greater problem with deadlines. Probably, also, we would find more cost overruns and fewer on-time completions associated with bureaucratic methodologies (too many cooks in the kitchen).
 
Elon Musk is one of those “yes”-sayers. And you can be one, too. Given any challenge, simply say, “Yes.” You might have to work hard and learn fast, but what’s your alternative? Want to know? Your alternative is to let someone else or some bureaucracy adopt the task. You gain nothing.
 
Do you risk failure by saying, “Yes”? Yes, but you also deny success by saying, “No.’’
 
Time for a parable. Read Matthew, Chapter 25, verses 14 through 30, for a story that is as much a psychological and entrepreneurial lesson as it is a religious lesson. It could just as easily be seen as a lesson in economics. A rich guy gives “talents” (think money, but the term obviously has a double meaning) to servants, and then leaves for a bit. When he returns, he asks for an accounting of what each did with the talents he gave. A couple of the servants doubled what they were given. One simply buried the money lest he lose it in some entrepreneurial venture that might have failed.** Two said, “Yes.” One said, “No.” You can guess (or read) the outcome, but it seems fairly obvious. Elon Musk—he’s not actually named in the New Testament—is one of those two that doubled what they were given.
 
Say, “Yes,” and figure out a way to overcome each challenge. The highways and byways of many industrialized countries are strewn with small enterprises built by “Elon Musks” who took up challenges without hesitation. True, there are many closed businesses and numerous empty office buildings; yet, not far from those that are closed are those that are not only open, but also flourishing, providing jobs because someone looked at a challenge and just said, “Yes, I can do that.”
 
With regard to opportunities, saying “Yes” offers no guarantees, but saying “No” guarantees failure.

* http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/tesla-powerpack-battery-south-australia-1.4416028
**Bible, New Testament, Matthew.  
 

This is what William Bradford, leader of the Pilgrims, wrote one year after their arrival in the New World:* 

     "They begane now to gather in ye small harvest they had, and to fitte up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health & strenght, and had all things in good plenty; for as some were thus imployed in affairs abroad, others were excersised in fishing, aboute codd, & bass, & other fish, of which yey tooke good store, of which every family had their portion. All ye som̅er ther was no wante. And now begane to come in store of foule, as winter aproached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besids water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, &c. Besids they had aboute a peck a meale a weeke to a person, or now since harvest, Indean corne to ytproportion. Which made many afterwards write so largly of their plenty hear to their freinds in England, which were not fained, but true reports."**

If, after enduring all the hardships they endured and being thankful for "all things in good plenty," wouldn't the Pilgrims be amazed at how abundant "all things in good plenty" North Americans now enjoy? And if, after enduring those hardships and the deaths of so many fellow travelers, wouldn't the Pilgrims be amazed at how many twenty-first century North Americans who have "all things in good plenty" still grumble at how miserable their lives are, how they must turn to addictive substances to overcome their "hardships," how they envy, and how in the midst of abundance so many simply want "more things in good plenty"? Why is it that so many of us who have so much want so much more? 

*Just in case you weren't paying attention in elementary school: They landed in the New World in 1620.
**Available online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm#a1621

It’s not unusual for us to refer to an individual’s soul. Whether or not we mean “immortal soul” or “deep-seated character,” we understand that a soul is some sort of essence that belongs to an individual. But can a “soul” be shared? What do we mean by “soul mate”? My goodness! We even use the term “soul of the team.” How extensive is the sharing? What of a “soul of a race”? What of the “soul of a nation”? In times of political and social turmoil, would we argue that there is no national or racial soul? Maybe there never was such a “soul” if by it we mean a consistent sense of unity or underlying character. Is soul a myth?
 
I mention this in regard to a statement by a German-American who addressed America’s participation in World War I as a necessary intervention. Otto Kahn was that German-American, and he had traveled back and forth from the New World to the Old in the two decades leading up to the Great War. He noted that Germany had undergone a Prussianization that led the country down the path to the war’s unnecessary atrocities. He argued that the 12 million German-Americans should have an American loyalty regardless of the affinities they might have for a country many of them left two decades earlier.
 
You might ask why anyone should revisit a war long over. Isn’t it as extinct as the dinosaurs? Its causes and fighters long dead? Why should anyone today consider the “soul of a time long gone”? These are different times, aren’t they? But Kahn makes a point we sometimes forget or cannot understand in the context of twenty-first century societies, that there are tradeoffs in the formation of a national or racial soul if such a “soul” exists. And sometimes those tradeoffs are far more injurious than beneficial.
 
In a “melting pot” country like the United States or Canada, the genetic mix makes the concept of “national soul” or “national race” different from a land with greater genetic homogeneity. Take Queens, NY, for example. Its residents are probably more genetically diverse than any other human gathering on the planet, certainly, for example, more heterogeneous than the indigenous people of Papua-New Guinea today or of Germany before World War I. In the context of Germany’s prewar genetic homogeneity, Otto Kahn saw his fellow Germans as a “race.” During the years prior to World War I, Germany underwent a transformation. In his book that argues for German-American participation in the war against Germany, Right above Race, Kahn notes that Prussianism “had given to Germany unparalleled prosperity, beneficent and advanced social legislation, and not a few other things of value, but it had taken in payment the soul of the race. It had made a ‘devil’s bargain.’”*
 
A “devil’s bargain” for an entire country meant, for Kahn, a selling and corruption of the nation’s soul. And since there was homogeneity of national background in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, the national soul was also the soul of a “race.” Kahn thought that "soul" had changed over the pre-war era of immigration. As he writes,
 
            “I believed that this was no ordinary war between peoples for a question of national interest, or even national honour but a conflict between fundamental principles, aims and ideas. And so believing I was bound to feel that the natural lines of race, blood and kinship could not be the determining lines for one's attitude and alignment, but that each man, regardless of his origin, had to decide according to his judgment and conscience on which side was the right and on which was the wrong and take his stand accordingly, whatever the wrench and anguish of the decision” (p. 17).
 
Is there a morality to consider? Should a “race” turn member against member in choosing “right” over “race”? Or, is soul a matter of the oft-quoted line by Stephen Decatur? “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!” You can replace “country” with “race,” “group,” “party,” or any term that implies homogeneity.
 
Right, wrong, soul. How do such words figure into our communications today? Do we believe, for example, there is a soul to a race or a nation? We don’t have to limit the term to nationality or genetics, but rather apply it to our general understanding, however faulty and filled with misconceptions, to one or another of us and our diverse appearances and genetic backgrounds.
 
Is there a pure race? In Mirror for Man, Clyde Kluckhohn, ethnologist, suggests the answer is “No.”* If there were (or is) one, does it have an identifiable soul? If Kluckhohn is correct in saying there is no “perfect race,” meaning a group of genetically homogeneous people, then on what grounds do we identify “German,” “Italian,” “Jew,” “Arab”? Certainly we throw the term race around a bit flippantly. On a trans-national scale, we use “Hispanic,” “Caucasion,” “Asian,” “African.” We seem to retain a generality: We are familiar with the familiar souls. But, as Kluckhohn points out, the familiar might be the mythical, writing, for example, that contrary to popular concept Scandinavians aren’t dominantly blondes.
 
Given the nature of melting-pot countries, do their citizens have some way of finding a unified “soul”? Is there an “American race”? “A Canadian race”? No? Of course, any unified group will eventually find its soul divided, if not in the first generation, certainly in the second or third. Heterogeneity and diversity do that to souls. So, look around. Are there identifiable “souls” out there? Does the concept of shared “soul” devalue an individual soul even in the context of soul mates?  
 
Look at history. Regardless of their probable loyalty and feelings of “Americanism,” individual Japanese-Americans suffered through American internment camps during World War II and the early restrictions placed on those who deigned to serve in intelligence and military units. Was no one paying attention to the national “soul”? Even if the Japanese-Americans felt it, those in power obviously didn’t share the feeling.
 
And nowadays, is any semblance of a national soul shredded by a constant chatter of the disgruntled during the 24-hour news cycle and trans-world social media activity? Are we headed away from a shared soul—if there ever was one—to a myriad of isolated ones, some of them ironically connected over great distances? Do we share soul only in the most restrictive and homogeneous clubs, neighborhoods, assemblies, and ideological groups? Or, are we through interconnectivity headed at least temporarily toward a “world soul”?
 
World soul. Wouldn’t that be something?
 
 
*Kahn, Otto H., Right above Race, London, New York, Toronto. Hodder and Stoughton, 1918.
 
**Kluckhohn, Clyde. Mirror for Man. New York: Whittlesey House, 1949. 

Funny how exact we’ve become in some ways while we have grown inexact in others. Take sports, for example. When NCAA and Olympic swimmers reach a pool wall, they reach for a “touch pad,” an electronic timer invented by Professor William Parkinson, a physicist at the U. of Michigan. We know not only who wins, but also by seemingly incontrovertible timers the split-second differences that separate the finishes. The timer produced a tie for the Gold Medal in Rio De Janeiro as Simone Manuel and Penny Oleksiak reached the wall at the same hundredth of a second, finishing the 100-meter freestyle in 52.70 seconds. Hundredths of a second, not dependent on some judge’s twitching stopwatch finger! Parkinson invented the touch pad in the late 1950s, and the Olympic Committee adopted its use for the 1968 Games in Mexico City.
 
Indisputable judging of racing winners wasn’t just a product of a twentieth-century physics professor. It dates to 1881 and a “photo finish” of a horse race in Plainfield, NJ, captured by photographer Ernest Marks and to the 1937 invention of the strip camera by Lorenzo del Riccio. The camera’s single vertical slit replaced the traditional horizontal shutter, giving a view of the finish line at different times. To a twenty-first century sports fan, such technology is a bit crude by comparison to the instant video replay and computer-generated trajectory of a ball that tennis players can use in an appeal of a line judge’s ruling.
 
Yes, we’ve become very exact in some ways. In American football, we know whether or not a player’s heel touched the sideline or whether or not—unless the camera view is blocked—a player crossed the goal line or fumbled an instant before his knee touched the ground. The precision of our measurements has led to emotional ups and downs as rulings by judges, umpires, and referees have been overturned. Ty Cobb might be turning over in his grave at the thought of an umpire’s favorable call being overturned by officials looking at camera images from angles no umpire could know from a single vantage point. Exactitude! Yet, as we have discovered on the football field and in other sports venues, we still sometimes have our view blocked by a chance object, angle, or player. The only guarantee against inexactitude would be ubiquitous cameras, but they would have to be as omnipresent as molecules in our atmosphere, replacing the very space, objects, actions, and players we want to time or measure.
 
Replays even serve in solving crimes and assigning blame for car accidents. We want all this exactitude whenever we believe they support our position. In contrast, we say, “The camera doesn’t tell the whole story, when we dispute its images. And unlike the process in fencing, football, and other sports, there’s no limit to how many times we can dispute the “exact” images in legal matters. In matters of behaviors and results that influence the economic status and the health of individuals, we leave room for dispute. And that seems reasonable because the circumstances in the “real world” are so complex and geographically widespread that no system can video or time all incidents. Nor would we probably want the exactitude of an Olympic swimming meet or football game, the latter with cameras positioned on the ground, in the press boxes, and hanging from overhead wires.
 
Why? Or, rather, why not?
 
Maybe we prefer to exist under the cover of inexactitude that comforts us like one of those fuzzy, warm stuffed animals or blankets advertised each winter. Too much precision makes our lives finalized, as though our contract with the Cosmos has numerous lines of fine print. But does anyone really desire accountability and final judgment on matters that could remain open? “Scientists and lawyers,” you say. Yet, surety and judgments in science and law have been found to be erroneous because of formerly unknown perspectives and evidence that later surfaced under reviews of the original circumstances, objects, and actions. In the judicial system, for example, persons once found guilty have had their convictions overturned because the “exact” information used to convict was later found to be  inexact, blatantly false, fudged, or simply viewed from a different angle.  
 
And in science? Is assumed exactitude the reason that Dr. Ivar Giaever, Nobel laureate, resigned from the American Physical Society, an organization that said the matter concerning climate change was “incontrovertible.” The APS used incontrovertible, a term it would probably reject if it were applied to any of a host of hypotheses and theories centered on the physical world. Giaever suggested that a global average temperature is currently impossible to measure because, if we can put the matter in sports terms, we can’t have “touch plates” and recorders everywhere. If a 0.8 degree Celsius is the supposed temperature change, Giaever sees that as remarkable on two grounds: How did we get to such exactitude? And why is that 0.8 degree not an indication of a normal fluctuation in an atmosphere with its supposed and quantified changes from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when the planet was most likely much warmer than it is today, to the Medieval Warming Period (PETM) thousands of years after the last big ice melt, through the Little Ice Age hundreds of years ago? How exact are our measurements? How ubiquitous? And on what basis do we judge that a rise of 2 degrees Celsius the IPCC says would be “devastating” to the planet? Two degrees is only a fraction of the PETM’s estimated “excess” temperature.* But “excess” over what?** Two degrees warmer than the Little Ice Age? Two warmer than the Medieval Warm Period? Two warmer than the PETM? Two warmer than Snowball Earth 650 million years ago when glaciation occurred near the Equator? 
 
If we see a rise in carbon dioxide and a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius over about 150 years, do we also see both in terms of 55 million years or even in terms of the millennium since the Vikings found Greenland a rather pleasant place to settle? Moraine State Park in western Pennsylvania is so-named because it has debris left when a giant glacier melted. The residents of Meadowcroft Rock Shelter about 50 miles southwest of that ice sheet probably burned wood 15,000 years ago. Did their fires produce sufficient carbon dioxide to warm Earth to the post-ice period, most likely an interglacial period like the almost dozen previous interglacials, in which we now reside? Could they have foreseen the melting of the great glacier? No one, fortunately or unfortunately, can look back to the present from the perspective of the present—even an instant replay isn’t “instant.” Its only upon seeing the replay that we know with more or less exactitude dependent upon number and position of recorders what happened “during the play.” In looking at a replay, sports commentators are historians. And fans, in looking at the same replay, can see differently depending on their affinities for a team or player.  
 
Just throwing this out there: What if the corn belts and wheat belts move into Canada? What if the tropics move into the subtropics? What if the rains move into the deserts and the semiarid areas move into former humid zones? As with any meet, match, or game, there will be fans who will cheer and who will boo when the pool wall, sideline, base, goal line, or temperature line will be shown to have been reached, crossed, or not crossed.
 
Funny how we play with exactitude. We sometimes want it; sometimes, don’t. And we do so in the context of judging one another and one another’s perspectives. So, don’t look for any resolution to the question about climate change that isn’t based on fuzzy warm comfortable feelings until we, probably about a millennium hence, see the replay.
 
 
*There are many sources that give estimates of PETM temperatures, but see, for example, https://www.britannica.com/science/Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum
 
**Consider what my plumber once related. Upon fixing a temperature control for a refrigerator, he was asked by the owner, “Can you make it twice as cold?”          

“Unfortunately, in many parts of the United States the condition of the intermediate schools and academics has been grievously neglected; and the authorities of the universities have been compelled to lower their standard, and to admit students totally unprepared for more advanced studies.”* Are you surprised that the foregoing statement was written for the June, 1831, issue of The American Quarterly Review? We seem to keep pedaling--and peddling-- a system that yields little progress as though we’re on a stationary bike.
 
With regard to education, shouldn’t we ask, at least periodically, about not only our intellectual direction, but also about our means of traveling? That the complaint registered in 1831 is mirrored in similar expressions today seems an indication that education as an institutionalized process has not progressed.  Have there been brilliant students and great professors over the past century and a half? Of course. But has the state of educational institutions evolved to eliminate the complaint of 1831? Not really.
 
You don’t need to read the 1831 article in The American Quarterly Review, but were you to glance through it, you would find almost every issue that plagues discussions about the efficacy of education today: Discipline, testing methods, preparation, selection of faculty, and standards. You might, however, want to ask yourself, “What the heck are we doing with all that money we spend on education?”
 
Money? How much? The President’s Fiscal Year Budget for 2018 request provides $59 billion in discretionary funding. That’s down from the previous $68 billion budget, but it’s on the back of eliminating more than 30 duplicate programs in the Federal Department of Education. Thirty! Duplicate! Tens of billions of dollars! And no one in the Department teaches anyone. In those expenditures lie $616.8 million for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) “for continued support of research, evaluation, and statistics that help educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders improve outcomes for all students.”**
 
“So,” asks an alien visitor, “haven’t you Earthlings mastered this education stuff after all these years of educating?” Apparently, we haven’t. Apparently, we’re struggling with the same problems in education we struggled with not just since 1831, but since Prodicus of Ceos, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle tried to teach philosophy more than a couple of millennia ago. Again, what the heck are we doing?
 
Want more? The states and localities spend money on education in addition to the federal grant money they receive. The National Center for Education Statistics says the USA spent $634 billion (average of $12,509 per student) on education in 2013-14.  
 
Don’t look for change. Sorry, that’s pessimistic, but it seems to be the reality. Way back in the nineteenth century, the author of the The American Quarterly Review article noted the number of universities and colleges in the Western World: “In no country are the colleges of higher schools so numerous, in proportion to the population, as in the United States. In France there are three universities; in Italy, eight, in Great Britain, eight; in Germany, twent-two, and in Russia, seven: whilst in the United States, we have thirteen institutions bearing the title of universities, and thirty-three that of colleges… yet a very wrong inference would be drawn, were we affirm that the education of a nation is always in direct ratio with the number of its higher schools.” And today? Well, for 2013-2014, the National Center for Education Statistics reports 3,039 four-year colleges and 1,685 two-year colleges, all receiving students from not only America’s 98,271 public schools, but also from home-schools, and foreign schools. ***
 
Yet, we still have the same complaints we had in the nineteenth century—and probably in the Lyceum in Athens in the fourth century B.C.(E.). Ah! The circle of life! Or, the recycling of education.
 
While we’re on that stationary educational bike pedaling away and going virtually nowhere fast, could we just pick up a book, do a little memorizing, and see whether or not just plain hard work makes a slight difference in the number and kind of complaints? Here’s a generalization: Most of those highly accomplished students and successful graduates of the past two centuries probably worked hard. But it doesn’t matter what I say, and it doesn’t matter how much money we throw into educational research, the process will continue as it has since the time of ancient Greece.

After all--literally millennia--that cycling, what can we say? "The reality of riding a stationary bike is that no matter how much time and energy we have put into pedaling, most riders have ended their efforts in the starting place, and the costs incurred in buying every supposedly 'new' bike have done little or nothing to change that reality."  
 
 
*The American Quarterly Review, No. XVIII, June, 1831. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35739/35739-h/35739-h.htm#Art_II
 
**Fact Sheet: President Trump’s FY 2018 Budget: A New Foundation for American Greatness Prioritizing Students, Empowering Parents, (Federal) Department of Education.
 
*** https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine toured the Pyrenees and wrote about his trip through the mountains in 1875. Written in several “books,” Taine presents part travelogue, part history, and part impressionist descriptions of the many places he passed, describing everything from cabbages to architecture, to breezes. It’s a rather thorough work, very readable, and somewhat instructive. It is in a singular point, however, that I find a bit of wisdom we could all use.
 
Describing “landscapes” in Chapter IV of the first book, Taine says, “I have determined to find some pleasure in my walks; have come out alone by the first path that offered itself, and walk straight on as chance may lead. Provided you have noted two or three prominent points, you are sure of finding the way back.” He continues, “You can now enjoy the unexpected, and discover the country. To know where you are going and by what way is certain boredom; the imagination deflowers the landscape in advance.”* What’s he getting at?
 
Taine then writes of the imagination’s providing expectations: “It works and builds according to its own pleasure; then when you reach your goal all must be overturned; that spoils your disposition; the mind keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it sees; it fails to understand this, because it is already taken up with another.” In other words, wait to see rather than imagine.
 
Imagination has played its role in spoiling the disposition of many: Individuals looking for that ideal mate, politicians looking for utopia, and vacationers looking for perfect recreation. For Taine, the despoiling came from his carrying images of the sea portrayed in paintings he had seen in Paris. From a chance viewpoint, he saw the sea not as it was, but rather as a disappointing and confined representation of an expansive and immense sea he had seen in those paintings. He looked for an ideal and failed to see the real. He missed the actual expansiveness and immensity because, as he writes, “the mind keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it sees.”
 
Didn’t have the fun you expected to have in that last party or vacation? Didn’t have that perfect date last time out? You might have actually missed what you were looking for because of your expectations. There are landscapes aplenty for walks along life’s chance paths to unexpected sights and experiences. Don’t let “fancied beauty” prejudice your mind.
 
*Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, A Tour through the Pyrenees, trans. J. Safford Fiske, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1875. p. 139.  Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44429/44429-h/44429-h.htm#link2HCH0002      

In The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura writes about the tea ceremony or ritual:
 
            "The outsider may indeed wonder at this seeming much ado about nothing. What a tempest in a tea-cup! He will say. But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup… Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others."*
 
I want to say his thinking, in general, isn’t new, but it does give us a way to connect to others and to the cosmos. As most meditators know, starting from a sound (like Om), a phrase (like “in the beginning”), or an idea (like The Good) can be a doorway into insights through a stream of consciousness. Objects also serve as such doorways, and rituals centered on them can codify the process of meditation. Start small, is the idea, and then build from quantum to cosmos. Tea cups and the tea service are both quantum and shared ritual. There isn't just a "tempest" in a tea cup. A tea cup holds more than a drink; it's a cup of the cosmos; it's a cup of humanity. 
 
Of course, in a busy world, we all seek some respite. And in the Western World we have our coffee shops and coffee shop rituals. There are, as we all know, “ways to behave” in coffee shops, such as the ritual of staring at a laptop or tablet and losing ourselves in the seemingly endless reaches of cyberspace while sitting largely unaware of and an arm’s length from the next coffee drinker. Yes, Westerners have rituals, but those centered on the lonely consumption of coffee in a paper cup dressed in an obligatory cardboard sleeve aren’t quite the same as the ritual in a tea room. We can drink alone in the corner of a crowded coffee shop.
 
Most of us are truly “outsiders” in Okakura’s sense of the word. True, we often go to coffee houses with companions, but the ritual drinking is an informal process (one usually loaded with extra calories poured, stirred, and steamed into our drinks). Concentrated, deliberate actions that could lead to expanded thought aren’t the goal in the busy coffee shop. Sharing? Other than being careful not to spill an expensive latte, few would say they see something significant in the actions of other coffee drinkers. “Mocha or caramel?” The question isn’t the same in a coffee house as “Orange pekoe or Camellia sinensis?” is in a tea house.
 
And that brings me to the matter of ritual. Why bother with elaborate repeated behaviors in stylized contexts? What do we gain from ritual? What have YOU gained through your own rituals? Is there anything comparable to a tea ceremony in your life? If there is, does your personal ritual lead to your seeing “the greatness of little things in others”? Do you have a ritual that enables you to see the expanse of the cosmos in a microcosmic cup?
 
 
 
*Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea, 1906. Reprinted in 1964 by Dover Publications, Inc.
Available online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/769/769-h/769-h.htm

What’s more important to you: Value or Truth? … (The ellipsis gives you time to think before continuing)
 
According to Frank Magill, editor of a volume on various philosophers, “Nietzsche points out that the value of an idea has greater significance than the truth of the idea.”* Let’s apply.
 
We hear and read much regarding issues centered on the truth in news and in social media; and since we are somewhat at the mercy of what others tell us, such issues play important personal roles in our thoughts and even, in some instances, our behaviors. We all know, for example, that later-debunked stories have led initially to mob violence, public protests, and festering hatred. Heated responses to unsubstantiated information are nothing new. We could put the Salem Witch trials, runs on banks at the outset of economic downturns, and scapegoating of all kinds into a bucket of falsehoods with often ill effects. On what values do individuals and mobs act upon reading or hearing “truths”?
 
Inundated as we are—even if we are not addicted to social media and 24-hour news cycles—by an unending string of stories about our contemporaries, we have great difficulty separating what is true over what simply serves some value system. For Nietzsche, according to Magill, “The value perspectives by which individuals live may be necessary and yet not objective. ‘Un-truth’ may carry greater value than ‘truth’ in many situations” (427). For us, that notion applies to where we stand on matters political, social, and religious. Often it applies more in the extremes than in the compromising middle between ends of a spectrum of perspectives.
 
Nietzsche wasn’t thinking about social media and instantaneous news when he was writing about truth and value, but he might forgive me for stretching his philosophy a bit in applying his notions to twenty-first century life. He identified a change from “classical values” promulgated by aristocrats and church authorities on the bases of truths to values based on the realities of everyday living. He didn’t argue so much a matter of relativism as he argued for re-examination of values as they affected humans personally and socially. In our own times, we might argue that the Superman who directs us toward some distant goal on the basis of his or her forceful words is the authority that has replaced aristocrats and church leaders in establishing values.  
 
Back to my question: What’s more important: Value or Truth? If you are one to broadcast “truths” regardless of their veracity through social media, is it because you are bound to perspectives from which you refuse to vary? Does the value in continuing any point of view or story lie in how it affects others and draws them to your cause? Do you see any conflicting perspective as decidedly untrue so much so that you become emotionally entangled in its refutation? Is there, for example, a component of emotion in any value that is greater than a component of reason or objectivity?
 
Nietzsche wasn’t opposed to acting instinctively. He saw value in a person of action over a person of thought. So, truth, though seemingly important, might not be what guides us. Values do serve as guides. We seem to have a choice between values imposed by others and constant transvaluation, or at least, re-evaluation. Whether or not we remain secure in the old values or derive new ones seems to rest on what we consider to be Truth.
 
 
* Magill, Frank, ed. Masterpieces of World Philosophy. New York. Harper-Collins Publishers, 1990, p. 427.