You never know where thoughts will go. This post started with the image of a moose running through a clothes line…

Alasdair MacIntyre:

These two related sets of facts, those concerning our vulnerabilities and afflictions and those concerning the extent of our dependence on particular others are so evidently of singular importance that it might seem that no account of the human condition whose authors hoped to achieve credibility could avoid giving them a central place. … Some of the facts of human limitation and of our consequent need of cooperation with others are more generally acknowl-edged, but for the most part only then to be put on one side. And when the ill, the injured and the otherwise disabled are presented in the pages of moral philosophy books, it is almost always exclusively as possible subjects of benevolence by moral agents who are themselves presented as though they were continuously rational, healthy and untroubled. So we are invited, when we do think of disability, to think of “the disabled” as “them,” as other than “us,” as a separate class, not as ourselves as we have been, sometimes are now and may well be in the future.

I’ll keep spelunking around from time to time in the shadows and bowels of what we call “philosophy,” but there’s good reason why most people — most people who love wisdom — never need to go there.

Here are two poems from just this morning.

“Clerks” by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

I did not think that I should find them there
When I came back again; but there they stood,
As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
Be sure, they met me with an ancient air,—
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
About them; but the men were just as good,
And just as human as they ever were.

And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

Those three utterly human lines especially: “And you that ache so much to be sublime, / And you that feed yourselves with your descent, / What comes of all your visions and your fears?”

“Spooked Moose” by Douglas Woody Woodsum:

Like a real bull in a bullfight, the full-grown moose
Lowered his head and ripped through my neighbor’s laundry, pinned
To the line from the house corner to the apple tree.

And like a bride with a twenty-foot train, it dragged the line
And the clothes across my neighbor’s lawn, leaving a wake
Of clothespins, jeans, tee shirts, and boxer shorts every few yards.

Then, like a moose in a panic because it has rope
And clothing tangled about its horns and more rope and clothes flapping
About its torso and rear legs, very like such a moose,

It lowered its head again and charged through the old barbed wire
Pasture fence, snapping the rotten fenceposts off at ground level,
Dragging and, finally, snapping, the rusty wires of a forgotten farm.

And then like a fearful beast learning fear for the first time,
It picked up speed as a bedsheet flopped onto its face
and three or four dragging fenceposts barked its rear ankles and shins.

It tripped and fell breaking through the fence again on the far
Side of the field, but struggled up once more to crash
Into the undergrowth and disappear amid the trees.

Lastly, like stunned townspeople in the wake of a twister,
My neighbor and I picked up the strewn pieces of clothing
As we followed tracks, like post-holes, into the dented woods.

That poem manages to be utterly human-in-the-world, funny if read in a certain way, and, if read another way, one of the saddest poems I have ever read.

Keep in mind that MacIntyre in Dependent Rational Animals is addressing two questions: Why is it important for us to attend to and to understand what human beings have in common with members of other intelligent animals species? And, What makes attention to human vulnerability and disability important for moral philosophers?

And this is as good a place as any for another thought, one that risks condescension and could certainly be overstated, but is nonetheless generally true. I know and have known many people who spend a lot of time, even most of their time, taking care of people with disabilities, and doing so largely unnoticed. Most of them care not a lick for philosophy or for poetry. Often, they like books I think should never have been written and TV shows I think should never have aired. I rarely agree with their politics or religion or “philosophy.” But I like their stories and admire what they do and who they are.

This is just an observation, one that keeps the world simultaneously bigger and more inclusive. There is no them, only us.

Speaking of philosophers who treat our rationality as “somehow independent of our animality,” MacIntyre says, “We become in consequence forgetful of our bodies and how our thinking is the thinking of one species of animal.” But more importantly, as St. Paul wrote long ago, we become forgetful of those members of our human body who have been doing this neglected work all along.

Not that the question about how to get philosophers to self-correct is unimportant, but the people on the ground rarely suffer from the delusions of “rational” philosophers. The more important, and perennial, question is about how we can get more of us to recognize and remember the people we pass on the street — or used to pass on the street, that is — every day.

It’s possible, even likely, that these are not separate questions. But that philosophers owe something to these folks and to those they take care of — these members of the body — this cannot be overstated.

Nick Catoggio:

If you had to bet on political trends, though, you’d always bet on inertia, particularly in an age of turbo-charged tribalism. “Strength” has been part of the right’s tribal identity since the Reagan era; even Trump, who won two elections by questioning GOP-led wars, reinforced that identity with boorish alpha-male bravado and a lust for dominance. Asking Republicans to relinquish it, even after the Iran fiasco, is asking a lot.

And asking Democrats, whose base led the opposition to Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran, and whose anti-American socialist wing is ascendant, to claim it is asking just as much.

So we will likely forge on into 2028 with both parties in their familiar roles, with Republican candidates halfheartedly promising strength and Democratic candidates half-heartedly demanding restraint. No one on either side will feel very convinced by the posturing, but longtime partisans will relish the reassurance that their tribal identity is, more or less, still what it’s always been. The president isn’t the only American besotted by nostalgia.

As an experiment, and in lieu of turning some thoughts into an essay the way I’d like to, here’s an audio excerpt from a Signal chat with my friend Luke. This is the Nagasaki piece referenced; this is the North Carolina incident mentioned; and this is the Oppenheimer post.

Update and correction — I was wrong about the recording. It was just the lyrics from my dad’s poem that were turned into an entire AI song, voice included. Which is more of a shame because not only are the lyrics good but my dad has an excellent singing voice.

For our west coast book club I’m currently listening to Moby Dick, wonderfully narrated by the great Frank Muller in 1987.

From chapter 1:

[W]hen I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the fore-castle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

And chapter 5:

[A] good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

“It’s almost never a good sign when Thucydides is in the news.”

I already quoted Jonathan Kirshner on Thucydides. Now Aeon has a good piece on The Peloponnesian War, and a little broader in its sweep:

The Melians represent one instance of a broader psychological phenomenon depicted by Thucydides: a fervid attachment to justice, especially in times of war, can carry with it certain delusions. In Thucydides, the just are self-deceived, both because they think that they will prosper on account of their justness, and because they overrate their own attachment to justice.

Sparta is a case in point. […]

At best, the Spartans are hypocrites, trumpeting the causes of justice and liberation while quietly acting out of fear and self-interest. Yet the truth is worse and more complicated. The Spartans are moved by a passion for justice, which burns hot when they mete out punishment. Those who threaten the interests of the city – including their own best slaves, whose only fault is their excellence – incur the wrath of the Spartans. They are self-deceived because they do not seem to realise that their passion for justice has grown into a monstrous taste for punishment. The crimes of the Spartans receive a fraction of the attention paid to the fate of the Melians, partly because the Spartans committed their atrocities without the Athenians’ famous (or infamous) rhetorical flourishes.

Meanwhile, the Athenians may appear not to be self-deceived. After all, they talk tough about the weakness of justice in affairs among cities, and aren’t shy about pointing it out to others. In a conference at Sparta before the outbreak of the war, envoys from Athens offer a tripartite defence of the Athenian empire. First, human passions – especially fear, but also desires for honour and profit – compel cities to rule to the limits of their power. Second, experience confirms this account of the psyche. Only weaker cities appeal to justice; the strong simply act, securing their interests as they can. Third, because human nature and experience together compel cities to seek expansive rule, no city should be blamed for so acting. Necessity excuses the Athenian empire.

Yet, Thucydides exposes the delusions of the Athenians no less than those of the Spartans. If the Athenians grasp the weakness of justice among cities, they overestimate the power of reason – including their own. …

… Again and again in the History, the Athenians browbeat their enemies at the bargaining table. It is unclear whether the Athenians care more about realising their strategic aims or vindicating their own cleverness.

It is not enough, in other words, for the Athenians to realise their ambitions; they also want the satisfaction of seeing the other cities acknowledge the truth of their worldview. …

… [F]or all their vaunted realism, and even when they focus their deliberations on material realities, the Athenians make bad decisions, or fail to understand their own motivations. …

More broadly, this misunderstanding of their situation extends to the nature of their empire itself. Pericles, the pre-eminent Athenian statesman, admits that the Athenian empire is ‘like a tyranny’. Yet he does so only in the final speech (before his death), with the plague raging through his city. Even then, he cannot help urging the Athenians to hope for glory. He claims that, even in defeat, Athens will be remembered for having ruled over more Greeks than any other city.

In one sense, at least, Pericles was not mistaken: we do still recall the exploits of the Athenians. Yet our remembrance is owed less to Pericles than to Thucydides. But, where Pericles poetically declares that ‘heroes have the whole earth for their tomb,’ Thucydides depicts the end of the Sicilian expedition: the Athenians leaving behind the unburied and the wounded, drinking their own blood in the river Assinarus, and dying, ignominiously, in the stinking quarries of Syracuse. And where Pericles promises his fellow citizens that they will leave behind them ‘imperishable monuments’, Thucydides leaves us his far more ambiguous History of the war.

[…]

It is ironic, then, that so many with greater confidence and less self-awareness apply their own purposes to a work concerned with the vast human capacity for self-deception.

Noah Millman, describing… almost everything:

Organizations that are governed by the profit motive have an obvious if manifestly imperfect check regularly imposed on them by reality. Organizations that profess missions beyond the bottom line have to provide that check themselves. If they abdicate that responsibility, they in effect confirm that the profit motive is the only reliable reality check, and encourage those who are in a position to strip them of their other professed missions in favor of the profit motive to do so.

Ed Yong:

So much crucial work is accomplished one person at a time. No one corners an ER doctor who saves a patient and says, “Great job, but how could you scale that up?” And yet, when it comes to communication or social change, value and success are so often defined quantitatively—more eyeballs, more clicks, more subscriptions. But I strongly believe that in this era of crisis, many of the most important initiatives are high-touch and small-scale, deeply personal and necessarily so.

Catherine Shannon:

Across cultures, mirrors have been used by soothsayers, sorcerers and witches for scrying, divination and attempts to peer beyond the visible world. In folklore and occult practice, the mirror is not merely reflective but permeable — a portal where something might appear, or someone may return.

Even the postmodernists have their own warnings. In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a “heterotopia.” The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. “I see myself there where I am not,” he wrote, “in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”

Some other heterotopias, according to Foucault, include the honeymoon trip, psychiatric hospitals, vacation villages, prisons, the theater, the cinema, museums, libraries, brothels and the cemetery. In these settings, the normal order of things breaks down and certain truths are exposed. Each of these places could serve as an apt metaphor for the screens, monitors and social media applications that relentlessly reflect us back to ourselves. This technology is a mirror, but it is also a museum, a theater, a prison.

[…]

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

[…]

Mirrors encourage us to choose the fantasies of ourselves over the realities of others. It’s best we look away.