Tag: Emerson

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To live well, find the zest

If you want to live a happy and healthy life, stop being a spectator. Get enthused!

Fresno Bee, January 29, 2023

Life is an adventure. Passivity breeds boredom. Enthusiasm is contagious. And activity is the zest of life.

A recent study of thousands of people found that zest is essential for health and well-being. The study defines zest as “vitality, vigor, and being energized and eager to engage in work and life.”

The word “zest” comes from cooking. It is the tartness of citrus. Like a lemon in winter, zest wakes us up and invigorates us. Zest also includes “love of life” or what the French call joie de vivre. Lovers of life see it as a continual opportunity for inspiration and delight.

This new study confirms a fairly obvious point. It’s not surprising that enthusiasm and vitality are connected. But how do we cultivate love of life? That’s a difficult question in a world hungry for drugs, potions and therapies. But zest doesn’t come in a can. Rather, it is found in action.

Passion is not external to activity. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that passion is a “powerful spring.” He also said, “nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm.” But this makes it seem that first we set the spring, and then we get to work.

In reality, this happens the other way around. First, you get to work. And in action, you discover satisfaction. In another place Emerson said, “activity is contagious.” The point is to get going. If the work suits you and you stick with it, passion will grow.

And there are lots of ways to get energized. The psychologist William James saw “eagerness” as central to the meaning of life. James explained that eagerness “is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality.” James understood that many diverse activities can give us purpose. We can be eager to learn, to play music, to make love, or to serve others. What matters is staying active and engaged.

James’ colleague at Harvard, George Santayana, celebrated the creative energy of artists and poets, who are absorbed with the creative act. The artists of life say, “life is an adventure, not a discipline … and the exercise of energy is the absolute good.” He explains, “The zest of life becomes a cosmic emotion; we lump the whole together and cry, Hurrah for the Universe!”

That zesty attitude seems in short supply these days. The world is awash in anxiety, moodiness, fatigue, and apathy. Some of this may be traced to the lingering disruption of COVID. There is also the drumbeat of bad news about war, climate, corruption and crime. Our diets, lack of physical exercise, and other environmental factors are also to blame. Screens, sofas, and soft bellies are part of the problem of our low energy.

Certainly, chemical and hormonal imbalances need clinical treatment. But the bigger problem is our cultural malaise. The critics constantly complain. And everyone has a list of grievances. When have you recently heard anyone say “Hurrah for the Universe”? When has reality caused you to tingle?

It can help to hear stories about the enthusiasm and passion of others. It is inspiring to see other people get fired up. Such stories can come from entrepreneurs, athletes, social justice warriors, scientists or artists. But watching others act is ultimately boring. Spectating is no substitute for doing. It is the creative act that gives birth to passion.

Now, a critic might object that this is naïvely optimistic. Energy, she might add, can’t simply be willed into existence. But the American philosophers don’t teach us that energy is the result of wishful thinking. Rather, they tell us that enthusiasm is the result of action.

The American tradition views the world as an experiment. American thinkers see the human spirit as an adventurer. Nothing is fixed and there are infinite opportunities for action. We are free, intelligent, and imaginative beings. To be human is to use our creative energies. Passivity breeds apathy and discontent. Energy is created by action.

Enthusiasm is an attitude, an orientation and a habit. Like a muscle, it grows when we exercise it. And it is contagious. Enthusiastic people inspire us to be more enthusiastic. If you want to live a happy and healthy life, stop being a spectator. Get busy squeezing the lemons and making lemonade.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article271717697.html#storylink=cpy

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Ethics and Economics: The Value of Value

Fresno Bee, March 14, 2021

What is anything really worth? Numbers flash across our screens. But real value remains elusive.

A new round of COVID relief is coming to individuals making less than $75,000. Some argue this is too generous. Others say it is not enough. Meanwhile, Wall Street valuations baffle and confuse. GameStop has bounced around. Bitcoin’s total market value surpassed $1 trillion this week. But Bitcoin is an enigma, seemingly built on the thin air of cyberspace.

What is the intrinsic value of things? Value is often measured in terms of labor. But labor is not all equal. How much is a man — or a mayor — worth? We learned recently that the mayor of Fresno makes over $400,000 a year when his salary is combined with his retirement income. Is that enough or too much? And how about the minimum wage, should it be $15/hour? Some talk about a living wage. But there is a difference between merely living and living well.

Americans are free to earn what the market will pay. Value is a matter of exchange. It is whatever buyers are willing to pay sellers. But exchange value gets weird, as Bitcoin and GameStop show.

Perhaps value should be cashed out in usefulness. Food is essential to life. So, the use-value of an apple or a loaf of bread appears grounded in reality. But why does a pound of apples or a loaf of bread cost about the same as a fancy cup of coffee?

We disagree about what is essential. Our judgments about necessity are colored by other values. Pricing is about hopes and dreams as much as it is about supply and demand.

Economic reflection leads to more fundamental questions about the meaning of life. Simple folk could live well on modest pay. Some folks may be content with $15/hour. But most of us want apple pie instead of apples.

Capitalist culture inflates our aspirations. We are not content with what we have. We compare our wages and piles of goods with those of others. This is not the inevitable reality of economics. It is a matter of ethics and worldview.

Once we see this, value looks even more arbitrary and capricious. Lines are drawn. But those lines are not fixed by nature. They involve perspective. If you make $76,000/year, you might resent the COVID cutoff. The mayor’s $400,000 seems like a lot of money. But in San Francisco that won’t buy a bungalow. And while $15/hour may seem generous for a teenager living with his parents, it is not enough for a single mom.

The circumstances matter, as do our expectations. The whole system hovers on hope. It is leavened by bubbles. A pandemic can pop these balloons. A credit crunch can cause a crash.

Economic value reflects a complicated social process. Bitcoin and GameStop show us that valuations can be manipulated. Momentum matters, as does peer pressure, the bandwagon effect, and the fear of missing out. People game the system. Buyers want bargains. Sellers want profits. Real value remains hidden.

Markets are not as rational as we might hope. Adam Smith suggested that an “invisible hand” guides this process. But the market is more like an invisible casino, a game of chance that is neither rational nor benevolent.

It is good to step back and ask bigger questions when thinking about the economy. Economics should not be untethered from ethics. Fairness and equality remain primary concerns. Poverty stands as an accusation against wealth. There is a fundamental flaw in a system where some people own more than one home, while others are homeless.

Most ethical traditions teach that envy and greed are vices. These vices leave us feeling incomplete. They count what we do not have. Envy and greed prevent us from enjoying the presence of simple goods that are near at hand.

Socrates said that virtue cannot be purchased. The best things have no cash value. Friendship alone can buy friendship, as Emerson said. The Beatles said that money can’t buy love. And integrity is the price for peace of mind.

Let’s keep these perennial insights in mind when thinking about economic issues. Happiness and wisdom are not for sale. They are earned and enjoyed in a sphere of value beyond the market.

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On Loneliness and Solitude

Solitude

An article in Time describes a “plague of loneliness” exacerbated by social distancing during the pandemic.  But being alone does not mean being lonely.  Some dread solitude.  Others use it to create, think, and dream. 

Loneliness can be caused by social conditions.  The isolation of the pandemic provides an obvious example.  An isolating culture can reinforce psychological pathologies such as agoraphobia and social anxiety. 

But solitude can be inspiring.  Poets and philosophers have often affirmed it.  Emerson said, “people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar.”  By “vulgar” Emerson means “ordinary.”  Emersonian solitude seeks to transcend the ordinary.  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche agreed.  They imagined the great soul rising above the vulgar masses, alone on a mountaintop.   

This is a typically masculine idea, patronizing and condescending.  Men have traditionally been free to indulge heroic individualism.  Women were not permitted the luxury of what Virginia Woolf called “a room of her own”—a refuge for creative individuality.

Freedom and creativity are essential for avoiding the dread of loneliness.  Solitude is not dreadful when freely chosen.  To be forced into solitary confinement is a terrible punishment.  But the mystic chooses silent meditation and the poet retreats to her private room. 

The dread of loneliness is connected to boredom.  Lonely people are isolated with nothing to do.  But solitude can be replete with activity.  Indeed, some activities require us to be alone.

Hannah Arendt explained the difference between the productive solitude of the life of the mind and a more dreadful kind of loneliness.  In loneliness, you exist as a mere object and not as an active thinking being.  But in productive solitude, you keep good company with yourself. 

The novelist Thomas Wolfe once claimed that he was the loneliest person he knew.  He understood that loneliness gives rise to the desire for self-expression.  But he also knew that loneliness lingers as the after-effect of the creative act, an emptiness that remains after your song has been sung.

Wolfe saw loneliness as “the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”  Loneliness, he said, sucks the joy from life, leaving us empty, impotent, ruined, and lost.  Time seems to flow on without us, while we sit “drugged and fettered in the prison of loneliness.” 

One solution is found in religion.  Religious thinkers have plumbed the depths of solitude, retreating to monasteries and sitting in silence.  Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, explained that solitude opens an abyss within that points toward the infinite.  A different religious idea is offered by Dorothy Day who said that we overcome loneliness through service, community, and love.  She explained, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love.”   

This is a common refrain: to transform loneliness into love.  A poem from Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“Finding”) provides a poignant example:

Out of the great darkness and wide wastes of silence,
Long loneliness, and slow untasted years,
Came a slow filling of the empty places,
A slow, sweet lighting of forgotten faces,
A smiling under tears.

Gilman reminds us that loneliness is what allows memory to unfold.  When alone we can enjoy the memory of those we’ve lost.  Later in the same poem, she explores how lost love opens onto a broader love:

Love like the rain that falls on just and unjust,
Love like the sunshine, measureless and free,
From each to all, from all to each, to live in;
And, in the world's glad love so gladly given,
Came heart's true love to me!

Here we get a sense of the strange productive power of solitude.  From out of loneliness grows the urge to communicate and to love. 

The highest human goods—art, religion, and philosophy—require solitude: a quiet and empty space in which the spirit can unfold.  Instead of allowing solitude to devolve into dreadful loneliness and succumbing to boredom, we must find ways to fill the emptiness with meaning, whether in exploring our memories or writing poetry.  This is also what scientists, entrepreneurs, bakers, and gardeners do: they create, build, and explore.  The aloneness of the creative soul is a pregnant at-one-ness, waiting to give birth to beauty, knowledge, and love. 

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Individual Conscience and the Common Good

When conscience and common good collide

Andrew Fiala, Fresno Bee, February 6, 2015

There is no easy way to reconcile individual conscience and the common good. The argument about the measles vaccine makes this clear. Some have refused vaccination, despite the dangers this creates for public health._55524133_friedrichwandererabovetheseaoffogoriginal

Similar disputes play themselves out in a variety of contexts: Ebola quarantines, eminent domain, and the like. During the past half-century, exceptions have been carved out for individual conscience with regard to military service and a variety of other issues. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a corporation, Hobby Lobby, an exemption to federal insurance laws requiring contraception coverage, based upon a claim of conscience.

Society demands that individuals should serve the greater good and conform to the norms of social life. The risk of allowing conscientious refusal is significant, as we are seeing in the current measles outbreak. Those who are not vaccinated put themselves and others at risk.

But individuals (and apparently even corporations) can refuse to comply. The advocates of conscience might quote Shakespeare, “To thine own self be true.” Or they may assert with Emerson that nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Human beings are fundamentally conflicted. We are social animals. But we are also individual persons. Each of us views our own life as special, unique and infinitely valuable. And yet, each of us is merely a replaceable member of the herd, subject to biological forces that flow through our bodies and affect the whole.

Human life is fractured by this irreconcilable rift. Life is lived in the first-person: you are the hero of your own drama. And yet from the outside, each of us is merely a bit player in a much larger story. You will be entirely forgotten in four or five generations. And yet, this life is the only one you’ve got.

Your own death is one of the most important events in your biography — the final, defining moment of your life. But from the perspective of the species, your measly life is inconsequential. Nature will digest your flesh. The planet will not notice your departure. But for you and your loved ones, your departure to the undiscovered country will be an infinite loss.

Our heroes have often been conscientious refusers: Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther King. But refusal antagonizes the herd. It is not surprising that these heroes were killed. Occasionally the moment is ripe for a refuser to make a difference, especially when the herd is obviously wrong. But most of the time, the tidal movements of society and nature sweep individuals along, and away.

Some individualists claim that individuals should never submit to society’s demands. On the other hand, collectivists claim that social welfare always trumps the right of conscience. At one end is lonely egoism. At the other end is totalitarianism.

Neither solution is acceptable for those of us committed to a democratic social life. Individuals should not lose themselves completely in the herd. Nor should we live in defiance of society. To be human is to suffer in the middle. The tragedy of being human is that we are pulled in multiple directions by opposing forces and conflicting duties.

Religion appears to offer one sort of resolution. An omnipotent God can hold all of this together in his benevolent hands. God is big enough to love each of us infinitely, while also understanding the substance of the common good. But the mystery of divine omnipotence gives us little to go on. We live this side of paradise, without access to divine omniscience.

Does God want us to vaccinate our children, to provide contraception, or to serve in the military? Religious people disagree about the answer to those questions. Every act of conscience is a leap of faith.

Another solution appeals to science. Scientists understand how vaccinations help prevent epidemics. But science can’t tell us how to live in the first-person or how to balance our values, duties, and commitments. Individuals must still interpret the data and apply it to their own lives.

There is no way around this dilemma. Claims of individual conscience can cause outbreaks of measles. But each measly individual also has a claim on infinite value. And a democratic society of conscientious individuals is as dangerous as it is inspiring.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2015/02/06/4367159_fiala-on-ethics-when-conscience.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

 

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Gentle, rural Jesus

Gentle, rural Jesus had to face harsh urban reality

Fresno Bee, March 10, 2012

The region near the Sea of Galilee is lovely this time of year.  Wildflowers bloom on the hills.  The Jordan River begins here, flowing gently south toward the desert.  The tradition tells us that John baptized people here.  Perhaps John understood the joy of taking a dip in a mountain creek.

Jesus found his disciples here among the hill people and fishermen.  At some point after he swam with John in the Jordan, Jesus went to a hilltop above the Sea of Galilee, where he gave his Sermon on the Mount.  I stood on this rocky knoll the other day and watched the sun sink into the mists.  It was gently beautiful: a fitting place for a sermon about love.

Mark Twain came here once.  But he wasn’t impressed.  Twain thought the little lake of Galilee was “dismal and repellant” in comparison to the magnificence of our own Lake Tahoe.  He is right.  Nothing compares to Tahoe.  But there is something restful and reassuring about this modest lake, a welcome contrast to the tumult of Jerusalem and the severity of the desert below.

The version of Christianity that I prefer seems to come from the idyllic country of the Galilee.  This is the Christianity of river rats and fishermen—not the Christianity of priests and politicians. This is the Christianity of friendly food miracles: of turning water into wine and multiplying loaves and fishes.  While I doubt that these stories are true, there is value in the spirit of hospitality and generosity they inspire.

Similar values are found in the Sermon on the Mount and its predominantly gentle message.  The Galilean Jesus celebrates forgiveness and love, turns the other cheek, and loves his enemies.  There are worries about hellfire here, which point in another direction.  But in general Jesus suggests that we need to be more tolerant, merciful, and peaceful.

The idea that Jesus was a gentle soul in tune with nature has been described by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Emerson thought that churches and catechisms obscured the truth of Christianity.  He suggested that Christianity is best understood, “from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds.”  What Jesus discovered, according to Emerson, is that nature is good and that we each possess the divine within us. Life does look good when you are floating on Tahoe or Galilee, when you take a dip in the Merced or the Jordan.

But Bible doesn’t leave it at that.  When Jesus goes to Jerusalem, the rural idealism of the Galilee comes into conflict with the political and religious hierarchies of church and state.  Political and religious authorities don’t like river rats and backwoods fishermen.  Such outsiders reject the rules and power plays of the city.  When these rustics go to town, they get into trouble.  Some of them get arrested and even killed.

The God of cities and temples is severe and wrathful, demanding obedience and sacrifice.  Jerusalem is a city of kings and priests, with a long history of religious violence.  It is not surprising that Jesus is killed in Jerusalem.  Wouldn’t Jesus have done better if he had stayed in the Galilee, swimming with John, fishing with Peter, and turning water into wine?  If only life were always and everywhere so easy.

But life is not easy everywhere.  As we drove to Galilee along the Jordan River from Jericho, we passed through impoverished Palestinian towns, we saw barbed wire and the new security wall.  We were hassled by the cops more than once.  Above the Galilee lies the contested Golan Heights and beyond that Syria, where children are being murdered by their own government.

The sweet and mild Jesus that Emerson dreamed of could not ignore the suffering of others.  It is nice to retreat from the city and enjoy a pleasant mountain holiday.  But poverty, injustice, and war make that impossible for most people.  The meek remain disinherited and there is no peace.  That may be why Jesus had to leave the hills and take his message to the halls of power.  Once you understand how easy it is to find peace, love, and joy among the wildflowers, you realize how wrong it is that so many of us are prevented from enjoying these simple blessings.