Ah! What will the new year bring? What, in fact, has any new year brought? As we roll the die of time, does the number favor us with fortune?
 
I remember reading Popular Science at the barber shop when I was young. That was many moons ago when I had hair and my mother made me go to the barber for some dreaded loss of playtime on a Saturday morning. Where was I? Oh! The barbershop and those magazines that invariably showed me the wondrous future of flying cars, space stations, robots, and gleaming buildings reaching into the sky. The future was headed my way, and all I had to do was roll the die of life: Time itself would bring all the wonder to me just by a strangely predictable happenstance. Just by continuing to live, I would run into that glorious future.
 
I have lived into that future, and, as humans always do, I ask, “What’s next?” because there always seems to be another issue. Of course, to reach all those “wonders,” others—not I, sorry to say—used science and technology. As I said, I needed only to live to the present time to experience that Popular-Science Future. All of us are aware of “breakthroughs” that came with the roll of time’s die. We have reached other planets, landed on Mars, even, and we have learned much about our biology and atoms.
 
So much science and technology! Many scientists and technologists have discovered much during those intervening years of hair loss. I ask myself, “What have I been lucky enough to learn by virtue of my living today?” I realize I understand matters that the ancients thought were the products of divinity or magic. Imagine! In all those discoveries and inventions promised in Popular Science articles, I had no idea that my knowledge would include not just technological matters, but also biological ones. Fortunately, I have lived long enough to know why wombats produce cubic poop. Say what?
 
More people on the planet since those barbershop days mean more scientists exploring ever more refined subjects, satisfying curiosity none of even knew we had because we were unaware, for example, that wombat poop was cubic, or, at least, angular—“cuboid poops,” as Laurel Hamers calls them in an online article for ScienceNews.* One of the scientists who studied the poops, Patricia Yang of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, notes, “They can be stacked or rolled like dice….”
 
With every haircut came a new issue of Popular Science with articles promising to unravel the mysteries of the universe through science and technology, each issue promising a life of ease just as easily obtained as wealth at a gaming table in Vegas. But all those Saturday mornings in the barbershop looking into my bright and lucky future filled with wonder seem to have culminated on a different kind of crap table.
 
Now what? Have I even greater knowledge and understanding to look for in the coming year or years? Or…
 
Well, if knowledge is valuable for its own sake, I guess the die of good fortune did roll for me in the Vegas of that future-become-present: I belong to the first generation to know why wombats have cuboid poops. The die of our future, it appears, might be cast, but it often comes up scat.
 
 
*Hamers, Laurel. “Wombats are the only animals whose poop is a cube. Here’s how they do it.” ScienceNews online. November 18, 2018. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-wombats-poop-cubes     Accessed December 30, 2018. 

Prophetic almost, certainly interesting, and definitely easily sing-able, the lyrics of Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are a-Changin’”  seem appropriate for Indonesians living around the Sunda Strait. First some lyrics:
 
Come gather around people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'
 
Was he writing about the December, 2018, tsunami generated when almost 2/3 of Anak Krakatau slid into the surrounding water during an eruption, killing over 400 people? If so, then we need to tweak the lyrics and the title a bit: “The Times: They Aren’t a-Changin’." Krakatau, or Krakatoa, has a long history of eruptions, the most famous of which is the catastrophic 1883 eruption that killed more than 30,000 people in the area. A large mass of the mountain not blasted into ash fell into the resultant caldera that in conjunction with a phreatomagmatic explosion generated a tsunami over 100 feet high. We don’t need all the details here, just the key: Krakatau makes the islands of the Sunda Strait one of the most hazardous places to build a home.
 
We just can’t seem to pass on the information about risky places. If I told you that Anak Krakatau is simply sleeping and that it will awake, possibly with devastating pyroclastic flows, earthquakes, and tsunamis, would you say, “Hey, I want to live there. It’s a beautiful tropical site. What more could one ask for? There’s the sea and the spectacular view of a volcano.”
 
How soon do we forget? One generation? Living on the San Andreas or in the Andes beneath Nevada del Ruiz?
 
The destruction of WWI seems to have been lost on those who caused WWII just 21 years later. We’re still in the midst of overdose deaths that have been “erupting” in western culture for decades. We don’t seem to be anywhere near the end of gang violence that goes back thousands or years. I’m done. You can take over to name the rest….
 
So, I ask myself, “Am I living in the vicinity of some kind of analog of Anak Krakatau, some physical or human phenomenon that might repeat itself? Am I just as unaware of the dangers around me as those who recently chose to live in a volcanic danger zone that had already killed tens of thousands of former residents? What is it that I do not know because I have not carefully studied the past? In Dylan’s words, is my time ‘worth savin’? True, that which changes can also threaten. Maybe we can’t be faulted for not knowing those changes beforehand, but we can be faulted for not remembering what hasn’t changed. Krakatau hasn’t changed. It’s still a volcano capable of erupting. The San Andreas Fault hasn’t changed. The effects of war haven’t changed as the deaths of millions in WWI followed by the deaths of tens of millions in WWII reveal.”
 
“…you better start swimmin’.” Not my words, but surely pretty good advice.

Is there little that is not today considered “political”? Either we have corrupted the term to make it the most all-inclusive word, or we have become obsessed with a single approach to all things human. Can you acknowledge that there are matters we can view from other perspectives?
 
Here’s a human thing we might try to divorce from politics: We have; we spend. Holding onto “excess” money is difficult. And the principle applies to fossil fuels. We panicked liked Chicken Little in the 1970s when we thought we would burn through most of our oil reserves by the 1990s. The perception of diminishing reserves made us think it was time to conserve and invent some green technology. Smart thinking, but it failed like a person desiring to spend less while doing the week’s grocery shopping on payday and on an empty stomach.
 
Since the 1970s, news of previously unknown reserves oozed up like petroleum from beneath Oil Creek. But it just wasn’t news of more oil that surfaced; it was also reports of more natural gas. Four to five decades after the doomsday panic about fossil fuel reserves, we began to see those reserve numbers increase. Ironically, the discovery of previously unknown reserves coincided with our new panic: Using fossil fuels in our engines of production and cars might warm the atmosphere.
 
Dilemma: What do we do with our oil and natural gas wealth? If we “spend” it, we face domestic social and international condemnation from groups convinced that we face a global catastrophe that might shift the wheat and corn belts; if we don’t use those reserves, we struggle against our penchant for spending when we’re rich and that desire for a car larger than the one circus clowns use.  
 
We find ourselves to be richer now than we predicted in the 1970s. If you have paid attention to the fluctuating estimates of world oil reserves over the past half century, you won’t be surprised that in December, 2018, the U. S. Geological Survey revised upward the oil and natural gas reserves of the Wolfcamp Basin. Instead of 23 billion barrels of crude oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the Survey now estimates the numbers at 46.3 billion barrels of crude oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of gas. In a spend-it-if-you-have-it culture, Wolfcamp adds about seven years of oil and ten years of gas for the United States. You can add that total to recent reserve estimates for shales like the Utica and Marcellus. The USA might have in excess of 2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas; that’ll get us through the winter and power your public transportation bus powered by natural gas.
 
Of course, even large amounts are finite amounts, and we will eventually empty those reserves. Conservation makes sense, but we won’t be frugal as history shows.   
 
“No,” you say. “We have to do something. We’re ruining the planet.”
 
“Okay,” I ask. “Who are the ‘we,’ and what are YOU doing about it? What’s the something you are doing? Are you looking for the government to impose restrictions? Are you looking for a political, and not a personal, solution? Do you believe the majority of people will act in the best interests of humanity? More fundamentally, do you think cutting fossil fuel use is in the best interests of humanity? Again, if you answer in the affirmative for the last question, what are YOU doing about it?
 
“Game theorists might suggest that people—you and I—will eventually settle on actions beneficial to the best general interests, but you probably suspect a different outcome for any newfound wealth. Before people begin to cooperate under extreme conditions, they can act quite selfishly. So, again, what are YOU doing?”
 
“Me?” you say. “Well, I don’t use my car unless it is clearly necessary; I plan all my trips to stores, and I go when traffic is lightest. I take the shortest routes, and if I’m in a stationary traffic jam, I turn off my engine. I walk as much as possible, even to the grocery store. I don’t buy any plastics made from fossil fuels. I keep my air conditioning set to ‘tolerable’ temperatures, cool in the winter and warm in the summer. I’m serious about my conservation: I wear lots of clothes in winter and run around naked in the summer. I turn out all the lights I don’t need, and I turn off any electronic device that is on ‘standby.’ My computer is off more than it is on. I don’t renew the asphalt covering on my driveway just because my neighbors want me to keep up appearances, and I shovel the snow rather than use a snow blower. In summer, I use an old-fashioned rotary push mower plus some sheep to keep my lawn cut. I’m the poster child for conservation. Why, I’m so busy figuring ways to conserve that I can’t take time to use any fossil fuels. I’m virtually off-the-grid and off the roads. I’m installing solar panels, a windmill, a direct link to a wave-energy gizmo on the ocean, and geothermal wells as I speak, and I’ve planted deciduous trees on the south side of my house that let in the winter sun and pines on the western side to block the winter winds and the evening summer sun. And the towels? Well, I use only one per week to save both the water and energy of washing and drying.”
 
“Admirable,” I respond. “By contrast, I say I want to conserve, but I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I guess I’m lazy with my fossil fuel affluence. I have; I spend. I’m a product of twentieth-century society: Freewheeling mobility, the desire to see the world beyond my front door, and living in a ‘reasonably’ comfortable—but marginally insulated—'older' house. To avoid paying higher prices for energy, I conserve as personal economics warrant. I agree that wanton spending is foolish, and I also agree that carbon dioxide can affect the atmosphere though I don’t know whether or not natural controls on temperature aren’t more significant, especially in light of a planetary history that includes the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum that was much warmer than today’s temperatures—and that occurred just as mammals were on the rise after the demise of the dinosaurs. Although I think that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere might warm it, I also know that a couple of significant volcanic eruptions can lower temperatures for several years, as evidenced by the “Year without a Summer” (Poverty Year).
 
“Then, I have a suspicion that since we have seen a number of glacial advances and retreats over the past two million years, I’m not quite convinced that the seemingly natural cycle of warming and cooling hasn’t placed us smack-dab in the middle of an interglacial period with another glacial advance on the horizon. If that is so, then by warming the atmosphere, we would stave off the next glacial advance that would make Canada and northern Europe, Russia, and the USA virtually city-less under the relentless crush and plow of glacial ice one- to two-miles thick. Given a choice between sweating a little or freezing much, I’m running with the former.*
 
“When I look around at towns and cities, I see people going about their daily business. Sometimes, they express concerns over air pollution, global warming, climate change, and ocean acidification. But almost everyone who expresses such concerns goes about daily life as though any personal change is unnecessary. Somehow, they think, ‘others’ will do the changing. And as for the rich elite and climate scientists who fly about giving speeches and attending climate conferences in an age when electronic and telecommunications make such travel unnecessary, well, if hypocrisy can be ranked, then mine—and probably yours—is small by comparison.  
 
“As I have pointed out in other postings, even those who signed the climate agreement in Paris did so with caveats while they continue to spend what they have. Don’t believe me? Read the agreement, paying especial attention to the footnotes. Look, in particular at India’s caveat. Sure, that country pledges to work toward using fewer fossil fuels, but only if the world community lends an energy hand and if nothing interrupts their desired economic growth. As populous as China, India seeks to be equally as rich. And China? It’s a signatory that increased its carbon emissions during 2018.** Only its devastating air pollution seems to provide an adequate motivation to alter its energy source. What good is an agreement like that signed in Paris that isn’t backed by real action? And what good is an agreement that can’t provide an unequivocal scientific answer about its effectiveness?
 
“So, to recap, we have new found energy wealth. We’ll spend it regardless of the ramifications that the International Panel on Climate Control seems to think will invariably happen. Few individuals will change their lives while at the same time faulting someone or some other group for Earth’s supposed dire future.
 
“And as a political matter, using our fossil fuel wealth will vary as politicians feel the pressure of those who would deny you your careless spending and those who would tell you to follow your human ways with newfound wealth. All the while, you keep asking yourself if the changes that government-funded scientists predict will actually come to be Earth’s destiny or if Earth will do as it has always done: alter some environments, destroy others, and create new ones. If change were not part of Earth’s usual routine, then we would see no previous extinctions, no previous changes in environments, and no rise of the primates that eventually led to you.
 
“Wow! You’ve got a problem. Do you ‘do your part’ to ‘save the planet,’ or spend as you have? I don’t know you, but I’m guessing you’ll tend to do ‘the human thing.’”
 
*As much as I like beer and recognize that its popularity over wine is a product of the Little Ice Age, and as much as I like Vivaldi and recognize that the wood in a Stradivarius violin is probably Little-Ice-Age wood, I still favor warmth over coldth.
**Big political controversy. USA pulled out of the agreement; China stayed in. China has increased its emissions. 

In Chapter 13 of Brain Briefs by Art Markman and Bob Duke, the authors discuss how movie goers miss continuity errors on the big screen.* Such errors result from editing scene takes. Some are glaring; others unnoticed. Guys generally notice the discontinuity in a scene in Fatal Attraction in which Glen Close is alternatively covered and uncovered by a sheet. Maybe women not so much. The actors perform well, so the director and editor chose to keep the discontinuity in the film. Since all movie-watching requires some suspension of disbelief and since, with a blind spot in each eye, every viewer misses some details in favor of others, our brains don’t record everything. Our eyes “jump” from point to point in saccades (watch the eyes of someone who is reading), also, so the brain has “to build” by extrapolating what the eyes miss. That extrapolation gives us a sense of continuity in every scene, and it has much to do with assumptions and with the weakness we have during magicians’ tricks. That’s a point Dukeman and Mark make in their book: We don’t pay attention to all the details. Generally, we don’t have to. We get the sense that we’re in a forest without looking at every tree. Oh! And by the way, did you notice that I changed the authors’ names?
 
The problem of continuity isn’t a small one. Is the universe discontinuous or continuous? We know, for example, that between the nucleus of an atom and the electron “cloud” there is “empty space.” Take out all that emptiness from your atoms, and you shrink to a sand grain of a person because the overall size of an atom is 100,000 times larger than its nucleus. And physicists give us all kinds of comparisons: “If the nucleus were the size of a football (soccer ball), then the rest of the atom would be a half mile away.”** Of course, not satisfied with that emptiness, quantum physicists had to go looking into vacuums, where they found “virtual particles” springing into and out of existence and quarks inside protons and neutrons. Empty space isn’t what it used to be. Now we might ask whether or not there’s an emptiness between two quarks or within one quark. After all, how can we identify something unless it has a separate existence. Isn’t that the way we recognize you? Continuous universe? Discontinuous?  
 
We seek continuity all the time through memory. You as a five-year-old, you as a teen, you as a young adult, you as a middle-age adult, you as a senior citizen: Which is the real you? You recognize yourself as a continuity all the while you recognize the discontinuities in your life. We have expressions for it: “That seemed like another lifetime”; “I was a different person then.”
 
We fill the void between the remembered “selves” with virtual realities because we can’t retain—and didn’t always know—the many details through which we moved and of which we were composed. We wonder about our identities at times and what we accept to be who we are. We are, in a sense, the directors and editors who choose to go with scenes because they turned out the way we wanted regardless of the discontinuities. We’re about the business of ignoring gaps or filling them when we want to establish an identity. But, on occasion, we recognize a discontinuity where the gap is too large to ignore.
 
And the same search for continuity and recognition of discontinuity operates in our relationships. We’re that arrow in flight, at any moment occupying a particular place along the flight path; at any moment isolated from the last and the next positions. Is the only continuity in our lives a string of discontinuities?  
 
In their collection of essays entitled The Discontinuous Universe, editors Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord write, “The writers here agree that man must impose some kind of order upon reality if he is to survive without being overwhelmed by confusion and inner disintegration. Yet, the structures he has evolved in his efforts to render the world intelligible seem to them more a series of metaphors that anything else—interesting, effective, even magical perhaps, but arbitrary, interchangeable, with their ideal aim of corresponding to structures that ‘really’ exist in the universe forever unverifiable” (v).
 
Look at the continuity of your life. Is it the product of metaphors? Would another set of metaphors make you a different person while still tying together that string of discontinuous identities you call “You”? Are you, as I hint, a director and editor of your life?  
 
*New York. Sterling. 2016. Pp. 86-90.
**BBC Documentary with Jim Al-Khalili. Atom: Clash of Titans. At 21:25 Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOJFznzSZhM Accessed on December 26, 2018.
***The Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness. New York. Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1972.

You might be an avid reader of the The Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy. I’m not. I just stumbled across the title recently and immediately began to ask what kinds of articles the magazine might contain. Forget the topic of “education”—though when I look through the archived issues, that subject seems to dominate. I looked through the issues to see the “philosophical” articles with one thought. Is there something new afoot? A “new” philosophy? By “new,” I mean, in very simple terms, a thought never thunk.
 
We’ve been discussing philosophical questions for thousands of years, and we don’t seem to be making any advances on the age-old problems*: Does life have meaning? Why should humans consider the consequences of their actions? How do we truly know we know? Those and other questions send us round and round and round. Philosophies become trends, and like all trends, they fade from popularity as succeeding generations idolize in cults inspired by more contemporary philosophers. After centuries of philosophizing, we have a pantheon of characters and “classics” to which we bow, even though we, ourselves, probably think an amalgam of philosophies.
 
And now we throw into the mix not just human thinking, but artificial thinking, or machine thinking. Do we want machines to think in a human way? What would that mean? Machine philosophy? Could machines “advance” philosophy? Or could we, in thinking about machine thinking, advance philosophy? At this stage in fashioning AI, designers are probably more interested in the process of thinking more than its products? The rest of us are a bit concerned because people like the late Stephen Hawking have told us AI presents a real danger to our existence. Maybe the doomsday predictors are correct or maybe they have seen too many science fiction movies that show the downside of AI: A totally utilitarian perspective—as though Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill wrote software for robots.**
 
Let’s talk communication’s role in “advancing” philosophy. Do we fail to advance philosophy because of an endemic parochialism of language? Two close people—spouses or teammates, for example—don’t always use words to communicate. Strangers also employ nonverbal communication. Mutual flirtation works that way, and it is probably the first step many take on the road to verbal exchanges and love. Should we say that philosophy can “advance” because it lies in words and not in potentially mistaken physical signals? No, although wordless communication can be misinterpreted, it doesn’t have a lock on misunderstanding. All those philosophical tomes have generated their share of misunderstandings that have led others to forge different, but not necessarily better, philosophies and outcomes inimical to humans.***
 
I suppose what we ultimately want is a philosophy with a meaning that is clear—unequivocal—so that can finally put those “important” questions to rest. But in every attempt to communicate clearly, there’s always something in the way, especially when we encounter someone who thinks differently. What gets in the way? Cultural differences, political correctness, or silly super-sensitivity, for example. Our differences are often marked by esoteric expressions of groups with a particular agenda? That is, if you are not one of the “in crowd” with access to a secret language or understanding, can you know why the “in crowd” validates its philosophy (and invalidates yours)? Would an advance in philosophy derive from a new form of communication that crosses all intellectual and social boundaries to produce widespread understanding?
 
Surely, there are identifiable advances in philosophy since Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, and Heraclitus thought deep thoughts. For example, we no longer think the world is composed of only four elements, so you might say we have advanced beyond the notions of the first philosophers. But it was science, not philosophy that gave us the periodic table and quantum mechanics, not philosophy. It was through neuroscience that we learned about thinking mechanisms, if not about the nature of thought and consciousness.
 
Did the ancients have insights that have endured to our times? Of course, they did, but maybe one reason is that their insights have been artificially supported by cultism or maybe because their insights aren’t really that insightful; rather they border on mere platitudes or syllogisms that might be more entertaining than informing. After not many years of observing human interactions, most of us derive certain common notions (e.g., some people do this; some, do that; this or that seem “just plain wrong,” etc.). Are those matters we hold in common the basis for a universal advance in philosophy?
 
During the past 25 centuries, we’ve done what we always do: Mess with things and elaborate because we simply want to rearrange someone else’s mental furniture or decor. The ancients had four substances on the table of elements; we have over 100 on the periodic table. So, yes, we have advanced our understanding of the physical world until we reached the point of unimaginable dualities of quantum physics with its mathematical descriptions and uncertainties. But what about our understanding of those other kinds of philosophical inquiry, the kinds that deal with knowledge, purpose, and ethics? What about the search for identity that makes everyone adopt a “philosophy”?
 
Who are you? After 25 millennia of thought about human identity, don’t you think you should have a ready and clear answer? Or is such an answer elusive because you can identify only in social and psychological terms? And throw in this one: How do you justify who you are? Or is there even a need to justify who you are? Is there a philosophy by which all people—you, in particular—can define themselves? Is there some universal way of thinking or universal principle that works the way General Relativity works?
 
So, what do you say about philosophy? That, for example, philosophy helps to define “the Good,” “the Good Life,” and related values and behaviors? That it explains evil or pain? That it defines either meaning or meaninglessness? Or, rather, that a philosophy is always particular and specific to the needs, attitudes, and intellectual background of an individual like you? If so, what is your philosophy? Is it applicable to your life but to no other? Or is your personal philosophy an amalgam because no philosopher you have ever read, regardless of his or her brilliance, has planted every human field? In essence, are there not fallow fields in every agriculture of the mind?****
 
You’re probably thinking that I just put you on the road to despair, that there can never be a holistic philosophy that satisfies the human soul. Or maybe you’re thinking there’s a difference between “philosophy” and what people in academia call a “philosophy of life” or a “philosophy of education”? When I was in school, I heard an educator say that teachers should have a “philosophy of education,” but I never considered the term to be philosophical because I believed epistemology and psychology already covered that matter—unless he meant “a method of teaching” by the phrase, and if he did, he accepted a trite definition of philosophy.
 
Isn’t a “philosophy of life” a term that has special meaning? Isn’t it a practical, workable way to go through life framed by some generalization? Now, shouldn’t I argue that a philosophy of life has room for “advances? Will that start you thinking that your personal “philosophy of life” is an advance over that of some medieval tradesman? The term  “philosophy of life” won’t lead to an irrefutable definition of Being, but rather just to some working definition a few like-minded people will agree to accept as a basis for moving through society. I’m guessing, however, that even like-minded people will think and live differently from one another as circumstances warrant, making any “philosophy of life” a situational psychology.
 
If you do have a philosophy of life, have you maintained it without changes? No? Would you call those changes “advances”? Do you think that is how I should interpret a magazine devoted to “advances” in philosophy? Instead of the word advances, should the journal title read Changes in Education and Philosophy or Alternatives in…?
 
Look at your own thinking. It differs from what it used to be because of experiences. You’re not a kid anymore. You’ve faced some realities that forced you to rethink your worldview. So, assess those changes. Have they provided you with “advances” on the fundamental philosophical questions, those that lead you to understanding absolutes or lead you to answers for the questions I enumerated in the second paragraph of this discussion?
 
I’m not being pessimistic about your seeking answers if you so desire. I’m merely saying that philosophy hasn’t provided you with any advances worth putting in your personal journal. Neologisms abound among those who believe they have advanced the nature of human perspectives; renaming or combining terms is only an exercise in creativity—like yet another love poem or love song.*****
 
Plain folk like me want intellectual paths to lead to something other than crossroads and merging thoughts. Advances? Show me a road that doesn’t start at some long-traveled Appian Way. All those ancient roads have been well traveled, and all of them have adjacent paths leading to this or that intellectual neighborhood, intellectual cul-de-sacs and dead ends.
 
Here’s the challenge: Read through articles in that journal—or any other philosophy journal—and find something you consider to be an “advance” in philosophy that answers those questions unequivocally.
 
 
*See the December 20, 2018, entry on this website for a related posting. You can think of other questions: What is of value? What is the root of justice? Does any ethical system apply to all? The list is long, but here’s the question you need to answer here: Can you name a philosophical inquiry that has a definitive answer with universal acceptance? Maybe you can, and I, in my limited knowledge, just can’t think of one. By the way, I’m excluding theological questions, such as those on what is “right” or “wrong”—e.g., war, revenge, capital punishment, keeping excess wealth, stealing a loaf of bread in a famine….

**Mill is an interesting case of high intellectual ability asserting a contradictory stance: He was for the individual, but also for British imperialism on the grounds that those subjugated to British rule were “barbarous”—in opposition to the “civilized” British whose rule would “civilize.” But then, what should we expect if we run any philosophy—in this instance, utilitarianism—to its logical end? If AI comes to complete fruition, we can expect one possible outcome to be the subjugation of “barbarous” humans.

***Think Karl Marx and the rise of oppressive communism under which tens of millions died and economically depressing socialism, such as that in current Venezuela and Cuba under the Castros. Think Karl would approve of the interpretation of his work?

**** And I haven’t even asked whether or not philosophy is an offshoot of theology derived by minds that reject any pantheon of Olympians or Creator.
 
*****Sorry for all these footnotes: When the Beatles discovered Eastern Mysticism, they fell into the pattern set by the Transcendentalists and other groups that, upon discovering a different culture, thought they were thinking things afresh, all the while simply thinking an amalgam. Try it: Adopt another culture’s way of thinking without holding onto any part of your previous way of thinking.

Which one of the following do you favor: 1) Peace to men of good will or 2) Peace and good will toward men? Your answer says something about you.
 
Here’s a partial list of translations of Luke 2:14:
 
            King James Bible: “…and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
            Contemporary English version: “…Peace on earth to everyone who pleases God.”
            Holman Christian Standard Bible: “…and peace on earth to people He favors.”
            New Heart English Bible: “…and on earth peace, good will toward humanity.”
 
There might at least 30 versions out there. The translation doesn’t seem to be a big thing unless you consider the ramifications of your choice. If you chose “good will toward men” or “good will toward humanity,” does that mean you are against war, capital punishment, and any form of revenge? If you chose “peace to men of good will,” are you inclined to say, “Damn the bastards; kill them all. They deserve it for harming the innocent in that attack.”
 
Peace to men of good will or peace and good will toward men? Sometimes one; at other times, the other?

One would think no question is a dumb one. After all, the mere asking implies a search for knowledge, possibly a search for “the truth.” But I just saw an article by Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, that makes me wonder whether or not there could be “a dumb question.” The title of May’s article is “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”*
 
May goes through the standard arguments: We are altering Earth at the expense of other denizens. We go; they survive. We stay; they approach extinction or become extinct. As a philosopher, May acknowledges that without humanity Earth would have no sweeping consciousness to mimic human awareness. The extinction of any living creature is tragic only when we label it so. Lions do not sit and weep after eating a wildebeest. Whereas it is true that animals, such as dogs and elephants, appear to mourn their fallen, it is not true that they could either anticipate nor philosophize about any wholesale extinction as humans can. Tragedy belongs to humans; we introduced it to the world, and we alone can “appreciate” it. And philosophy is our bailiwick.
 
Citing human “predatory behavior” as an argument by those advocating human extinction for the “good” of the planet, May then says a “tragedy” would lie in the loss of what we have engendered: “art of various kinds” and “sciences that seek to understand the universe and our place in it.”** Otherwise, he argues, the mere extinction of creatures—namely, us—capable of wanton destruction “would be a good thing.”
 
We dramatize tragedy and its antithesis, comedy. And we even have a set of “rules” regarding our dramatizations. Oedipus encapsulates the chief one in initiating his own tragic life by killing his father. Thus, in our sense of “tragedy” we ascribe responsibility to the tragic character, though in everyday life, we loosely speak of a tragic car accident or building collapse (Of course, we could attribute some responsibility to the humans involved, say, asking why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or in a building with design flaws). There’s another consideration: We can speak of “unfolding tragedy,” such as a widening path of destruction and death during a devastating hurricane, a terrible fire, or fatal epidemic; but we only see and understand the full extent of any “tragedy” in retrospect, a fait accompli. An “unfolding tragedy” is such by virtue of a series of events that sum to a final outcome. If humans were not around, then who senses the tragedy, who sees the final outcome marked by their extinction?
 
A world without humans would be somewhat safer for some lifeforms, but it would not eliminate extinctions. Earth has seen the rise and fall of many species (an estimated billions of them), most that died out long before the first primates began wreaking havoc.*** Extinction of species, probably including our own eventual extinction, is as “natural” as water’s flow downhill.****
 
Only humans can ask whether or not their own extinction would be “tragic.” Only humans understand tragedy, so in absence of people, there is no tragedy. There are only physical and biological processes. The question that May asks is a parlor game akin to “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” That’s why I consider the question “Would human extinction be a tragedy” the dumbest question.
 
Not done yet. I have to ask if there is any further use of “philosophical” inquiry. May says, “It may well be…that the extinction of humanity would make the world better off and yet would be a tragedy. I don’t want to say this for sure, since the issue is quite complex.” So, are we given to philosophia gratia philosophiae as we are often given to ars gratia artis (l’art pour l’art)? Is May practicing musings for the sake of musings? Has philosophy nothing left to teach us?
 
Recognize that the earliest philosophers centered their thinking on the nature of the world, eventually arriving at four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Then Leucippus and Democritus talked of atoms before “philosophy” turned toward the nature of life itself and human thought and behavior. And where are we now after 2,500 years of philosophizing? Asking questions about whether or not our extinction would be tragic? Philosophy is dead. It has never given us unequivocal answers to the so-called “important questions,” while it has twisted and turned through convolutions in “clever” arguments.
 
Apparently, the answers we seek about the makeup of the world, human nature, and behavior lie not in philosophy, but rather in physics, biology, including neuroscience, and psychology. True, even these endeavors fall short of completion, but they all have methodologies that produce testable results. Philosophy produces musings that might amuse even when the topic is tragedy, but that makes it little different from art, literature, and music. Maybe May should ask another question: Would the extinction of philosophy be tragic?    
 
*May, Todd. “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy.” The New York Times. Opinion. December 17, 2018. Online at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/human-extinction-climate-change.html
Accessed on December 18, 2018.
**Sic. Obviously, not “sciences,” but rather “scientists.”
***Raup, David. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York. W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.
“There are millions of different species of animals and plants on earth—possibly as many as forty million. But somewhere between five and fifty billion species have existed at one time or another. Thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive…” (3).
****Aren’t we the recipients of our life on Earth because the dinosaurs and other predecessor animals became extinct? 

Without question, we are products, though a bit removed, of the Renaissance. And among those Renaissance characters to whom we owe gratitude for the modern world is Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Somewhat of a polymath, Francis was a scientist, philosopher, and psychologist. Well, not a psychologist as we think of one today, but rather as an astute observer of humans. One of his many observations is this: “…some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances.”*
 
Each of us might consider his statement in the context of our own world view. Do we tend to see differences rather than resemblances or vice versa? It’s not a silly question. Some of us are analysts; others, analogists. Some need to itemize the world; others, to bundle it. I tend to think of myself as doing more of latter and less of the former, but, of course, I bounce between the two, and I assume you do, too. We all need to tear apart and put together as complementary ad hoc strategies for understanding and invention.
 
Do you see yourself more as analyst or analogist? The question is worth asking because the creativity of invention lies in analogy, whereas the creativity of understanding lies in analysis.  
 
*Novum Organum. Ch. 54.

“Sometimes, but not always, I get the feeling that reporters have only one of two approaches: They appear to overlook faults of those with whom they agree or attribute faults to those with whom they disagree. I suppose their enthusiasm for someone or against another is just a normal addiction to confirmation bias. It’s virtually impossible to eliminate any sense of bias for any writer who includes an adjective or adverb in a report. All modifiers are subjective.”
 
“All?” you ask. “Surely, there are degrees of subjective reporting, and so there are also degrees of objectivity.”
 
“Maybe. I guess one could argue that scientific reporting is ‘objective.’ Such reports rarely include first person references. There’s a tendency for scientific reports to be written in the passive voice, such as ‘The results were obtained by such-n-such an experiment.’ I see the obsession with writing passive predicates as silly. Did such an experiment run itself? Someone had to choose the materials, the apparatus, and the method of any experiment. Someone had to decide to experiment. Someone had to believe an experiment was worth his or her effort, and some reporter had to choose the subject for listeners or readers. I find no sound reason that a ‘scientific account’ can’t contain ‘I found through experimentation that….’ There’s a someone behind every scientific experiment and conclusion.”
 
“I’ll concede that point,” you say. “But in the course of human events, certain people and processes stand out against a background of the ordinary, the normal, and the repetitive. Reporters have to find something of interest, or they risk writing in a vacuum. Writing a diary isn’t the goal. Writing for others is what separates a journalist from a diarist. And as finite creatures, all reporters have limitations on what they know. Their knowledge and experience frame their reporting. Yet, surely,” you continue, “someone out there in Newsland has an objective view.”
 
“Okay, I’ll give you that some reporting seems to be objective, but only insofar as it does not contain a modifier. Look, this isn’t a new problem. Thomas Jefferson complained about the Press, and we could look at examples of obsequious sycophancy and outright slander in the more distant past.
 
“Take accounts of 1066 and the famous battles between the English and the Normans and their French allies. One particular account of the battle is the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (‘The Song of the Battle of Hastings’), written by Guy, Bishop of Amiens. Another account is the Gesta Guillielmi (‘The Deeds of William’), written by William of Poitiers, a chaplain. A third account is the Bayeux tapestry, a time-capsule history of the Norman invasion that includes a panel on the death of the Saxon King Harold. All three accounts reveal a bias of some sort. The Normans didn’t like their portrayal in the Carmen, because, at one point, the story suggests that a planned strategic retreat by the Normans was an act of cowardice; in the Gesta, the chaplain reveals his idolization of the Norman conqueror. According to David Howarth in 1066: The Year of the Conquest, the chaplain took the story in Carmen and ‘altered it to the greater glory of his hero. His whole thesis was that Duke William was a man who never sinned, never fought unjustly and never suffered any human weakness. His praise is often so absurdly obsequious that its effect on the modern reader is the opposite of what he intended.’ (143).*  In the 70-meter-long Bayeux tapestry, the embroidered images capture the history of the invasion in a series of panels that depict the Normans as conquerors. Supposedly, the tapestry was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William of Normandy’s half-brother, so you can guess the bias for William and against Harold.
 
“What’s the point I’m trying to make? Well, in matters past, can we see through the bias of the reporters of the time only when they portray with obvious sycophancy like the chaplain's? Take today, for instance. Do you see the world differently from the reporters you listen to or read? If you answer affirmatively, have you written your own account to counter the biased reporting for posterity? You realize that without your account, only one side will control future perceptions?”
 
Now you ask, “What do you want me to do? I’m not in the business of writing a contemporary account; I’m too busy to reveal the biases I observe so that the next generation has a balanced perspective. Am I supposed to spend my evenings embroidering 230-foot-long sheets of linen with scenes of my time? You know we have video nowadays.”
 
“But we all know that videos themselves don’t necessarily tell more than one side of a story, dependent, of course, on the viewpoint, the resolution, and the time they begin or end. And video recordings like all electronic records have a lifespan, first because of technological advances—you would have a hard time finding either an 8-track player or a floppy disk player today—and second because of magnetic erasure or breakage. You know, I think embroidering scenes of your times on linen might be a good idea. The Bayeux tapestry is a thousand years old. That’s not as old as hieroglyphic accounts carved in stone by Egyptians, but it certainly is as long as any newspaper, magazine, or DVD will last.
 
“You want the record of your times to reflect your sense of the truth? Start embroidering a linen sheet or etching some durable Rosetta stone. One alternative, of course, is to somehow convince others that your perspective is the correct one in the hope that by sheer word-of-mouth your story will pass onto the next generations unaltered—though you know that in the game of passing a story around a table, people confuse the details. Another alternative lies in complacency. Why bother yourself with defending the truth you perceive? You can’t control what the next generation will believe? Or can you?”**
 
*New York, Barnes and Noble, 1993.
**I see online that one company is offering 120 cones of polyester embroidery thread for about $133. Just sayin’.

If you read through Friedrich Heer’s The Medieval World: Europe 1100-1350, you discover his assessment of twelfth-century contention between different intellectual factions.* Heer writes of “the rancour [sic.] which so often accompanies theological debate and of the group egoism and vanity found sometimes in religious orders and universities” (104). See, just as you suspected, people just can’t get along when differences of opinion intervene. Being civil isn’t the normal; it’s the exception, and ours isn’t the only time when evidence for this abounds. If those involved in matters theological couldn’t get along, why should we expect those involved in matters civil and social to be any different?
 
The term group egoism is a synonym for group elitism. People enter into arguments from positions of bias as evidenced by what we read in editorial pages and hear in punditry. And if one belongs to a group, that group’s commonly held axioms become the basis for rancor.
 
I suppose most of us can’t see our own elitism. We rely on it to support our intellectual self-worth. That seems especially true of people in academia and entertainment. So that I don’t offend anyone’s sensibilities, I’ll give an example from the past.
 
One of the reasons that today’s vocal elitists appear to oppose “commoners” who question their principles and policies derives from an intellectual battle in Scotland between The Moderates and The Evangelicals in the eighteenth century. The self-proclaimed “enlightened” perceived arguments of their opponents as unworthy of consideration. In specific instances, where undeniable facts outweighed traditional ideas and beliefs, there was some justification in that opposition. I can think of the adherence of fundamentalists to a young Earth as an example, even though, as Sir James Hutton, the Father of Geology, said, “I can see no vestige of a beginning….” But empiricism like that of Hutton and succeeding scientists and like that of all intellectual movements, becomes quickly associated with a specific attitude: Those in-the-know believe they are "better" and "more intellectual" than others and can afford to ignore counter arguments and facts.

It was in the context of positions by the enlightened elite and the traditional evangelicals that John Witherspoon, an evangelical minister from east Lothian, wrote an anti-Moderate satire called Ecclesiastical Characteristics. The drama laid out advice that mocks the elitist position of The Moderates. As Arthur Herman reports, Witherspoon’s satirical advice to “the aspiring enlightened clergyman” on how to construct a Sunday homily contains the following dictates:

1. All his subjects must be confined to social duties---as opposed to religious doctrines.
2. There must be no reference to the afterlife.
3. His authorities must be drawn from pagan writers, and none, or as few as possible, from Holy Scripture.
4. He must be very unacceptable to the common people (195).**

 
And so, example upon example today, we find anyone of faith, any “commoner,” or outsider is derided by the elite, not refuted with a counter argument tested by rigorous debate backed by principles of logic and proof, but rather by haughty condescension.***

​Frankly, the whole “I’m better than you” attitude is more than a little tiring, particularly in today’s political sphere and the incessant chatter in every electronic medium. No commoner—no outsider—can ever win an argument under the principles of elitism. No one can logically question the axioms of group egoism: That humans are the sole cause of an unavoidable global climate catastrophe, that the devout are generally stupid and uninformed, and that the intellectual accomplishments of those outside the accepted “group” are laughable. There’s safety in group egoism because like-minded people accept ideas and policies while they ignore any facts or arguments that negate their thinking. Elitism is a warm fuzzy blanket that insulates. It is also an opaque blanket. No outside light penetrates.
 
If you are an outsider, save your breath; save your energy. You’re not going to make your point to open minds; that blanket muffles the sound anyway. It’s an unfortunate circumstance, but it’s not a new one. You can go back to the twelfth century, to the eighteenth century, or earlier to find the roots of modern elitism in the early university and church-school settings. You can go to twentieth-century accounts of elites rejecting Alfred Wegener’s notion of “continental drift” (now, seafloor spreading) or Richard P. Feynman’s explanation of quantum electrodynamics. Elites of any kind believe in their superiority and extoll their own intellectual prowess. That puts them in the mix of the most closed-minded.
 
Group elitism, group egoism—however we label it—is the obstacle that prevents the free exchange of ideas judged on the basis of their objective merit.
 
*Translated by Janet Sondheimer, The New American Library, A Mentor Book, 1961 (also, 1963).
 
**Herman, Arthur. How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York. MJF Books, 2001.
 
***I won’t make any comment that offends here, but I will ask the reader to examine the Press’s designation of the “elite,” its treatment of those among the “elite,” and its treatment of those deemed not worthy of inclusion by virtue of their political, ideological, or religious affiliation. Note, too, that most “arguments” against “outsiders” are more derisive than logical.