Skeptics, fake and for real

 We're still in the deep freeze here, with classes canceled for a third consecutive day. But we're more fortunate than many, in places like Austin, we still have power and heat and light. So why not think about some old dead French philosophers? Weather is a passing thing (though climate is more persistent), doubt and uncertainty are forever.

LISTEN (recorded Sep. 2020). Tomorrow in CoPhi we're scheduled to turn to three French philosophers, Descartes the pretend-skeptic, Montaigne the real one, and Pascal the gambler who wanted desperately to suppress his doubts in deference to the promises of faith.

Rene Descartes "meditated" himself into a conjured and contrived form of doubt, but never really doubted for an instant that the world revealed by the senses--beginning with the senses themselves, and our perception of ourselves as sensate creatures capable of encountering a world--is real enough. What he doubted was not his and our existence as embodied knowers, but the status of that knowledge. For him, if we're not indubitably certain then we know nothing... (continues)

Questions Feb 18

 LH

• Do you prefer Descartes's form of skepticism to Pyrrho's? 64
• Is it objectionable, as C.S. Peirce said (noted in How the World Thinks), to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in real life?
• Do you think you know that you're not dreaming right now? Are there ever times when you don't think you know that?
• Do you think Gilbert Ryle's "ghost in the machine" description of mind-body dualism is fair? 67
• What do you think of Pascal's statement that the immensity of the night sky is frightening? Do you think it was fear that motivated his approach to religion? 
• Is Pascal's Wager a rational and sensible approach to religious belief? 71
• Do you agree with Pascal that if you gamble on God and lose, "you lose nothing"? 72
• By limiting his "wager" to a choice between either Christian theism or atheism, does Pascal excludes too many other possible "bets"? 74

FL

• Do you think Christian religiosity is "the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all? (FL 89)
• Is Andersen right, did Enlightenment skepticism receive a religious make-over in America and become conspiracy-mindedness? 89
• Was Franklin right about the Masons? 90 
• Would the Civil War have been less bloody, or less likely even, if neither Union nor Confederacy had thought God was on their side? 95
• What do you think of Swallow Barn? 96

HWT

• What does "perfect divine transcendental unity" mean to you, in practical terms? 147
• Do you think of your ordinary experience, day to day, as "nothing more than a powerful illusion"? 149 Does anyone ever really act as if they believed that? Is it possible to function effectively and happily with such an attitude?
• Do you believe in predestination and your "recorded destiny"? 154
• Do you believe natural disasters that kill innocent people are "God's will" AND that people are nonetheless "culpable"? 155
• What do you think of Harry Frankfiurt's "bullshit"? 162
• What do you think of Bentham's "felicific calculus"? 
• Do you think physics "fixes the facts" even if we can't reduce everything to it (because for instance there are no car batteries in fundamental physics)? 165
• Was Stephen Hawking wrong about philosophy? 167

Old posts-

It’s the birthday (Feb. 28) of essayist Michel de Montaigne (books by this author), born in Périgord, in Bordeaux, France (1533). He is considered by many to be the creator of the personal essay, in which he used self-portrayal as a mirror of humanity in general. Writers up to the present time have imitated his informal, conversational style. He said, “The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness: such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.” WA
==
Montaigne in The Stone...

1. 

   The Essayification of Everything

   “How to Live,” Sarah Bakewell’s elegant portrait of Montaigne, the 16th-century patriarch of the genre, and an edited volume by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French called “Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne...

   May 26, 2013 - By CHRISTY WAMPOLE 
2. 

   Of Cannibals, Kings and Culture: The Problem of Ethnocentricity

   In August of 1563, Michel de Montaigne, the famous French essayist, was introduced to three Brazilian cannibals who were visiting Rouen, France, at the invitation of King Charles the Ninth. The three men had never before left...

   February 17, 2013 - By ADAM ETINSON 

3. What's Wrong With Philosophy?

   getting on board a student’s own agenda. Sometimes understanding is best reached when we expend our skeptical faculties, as Montaigne did, on our own beliefs, our own opinions. If debate is meant to be a means to truth — an idea...

   September 03, 2013 - By LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF 
4. 

   Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene

   questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone’s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is...
5. ==

Old posts-
Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Montaigne

Montaigne was originally scheduled for just before our Spring Break, but it got a jump-start week before last. Looked like a snow-globe out there for awhile. Now, it's practically Spring!

Older Daughter and I went and did what we'd been talking about doing for years, now that her Break and mine finally coincided: went to Florida's Grapefruit League Spring Training! Day after day of waking to 72 degrees, on the way to high 80s. Baseball and bliss.

But that was then. Now, Montaigne (& Bakewell on How to Live acc'ing to M)...

One good way to live, he thought, was by writing and reflecting on our many uncertainties. Embracing and celebrating them, in fact. That makes him an anti-Descartes, a happy and humane modern skeptic.

One thing we know for sure is the historical timeline. Montaigne comes first, but since I always introduce him as the anti-Descartes he rarely gets top billing. The late Robert Solomon did the same thing. Not fair, for a guy who gave us the essay and (as Sarah Bakewell says) is so much "fun" to read. Unlike Descartes he was a true skeptic (again though, not so far over the cliff as Pyrrho) and "quite happy to live with that." His slogan was Que sçais-je?

Montaigne retired in his mid-30s to think and write, and ponder what must have felt to him (ever since his unplanned equine-dismounting event) like ever-looming mortality. He inscribed the beams of his study with many of his favorite quotes, including "nothing human is foreign to me" and "the only certainty is that nothing is certain."

Some of Montaigne's life-lessons and rules for how to live, as decoded by Sarah Bakewell: Don't worry about death; Pay attention; Question everything; Be convivial; Reflect on everything, regret nothing; Give up control; Be ordinary and imperfect; Let life be its own answer.

Montaigne leaps from the page as mindful, both ruminative and constantly attentive to the present moment. He has good advice for the walker. "When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me."

Sarah Bakewell quotes Montaigne, disabusing us of the false image of him "brooding" in his tower. He was a peripatetic, too: "My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." So, like Emerson he might have said "my books are in my library but my study is outdoors."






There's just something irresistibly alluring about the candid and disarming familiarity of his tone, that's drawn readers to this original essayist for four and a half centuries and obliterates the long interval between him and us. He makes uncertainty fun.

"The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness"...

[Montaigne @dawn... M on Self-esteem (deB)... M quotes... M's beam inscriptions... M "In Our Time" (BBC)...M's tower...M's Essays...]

Also today, we'll consider the philosophical status of science. Montaigne the fallible skeptic actually had a better handle on it than Descartes, the self-appointed defender of scientific certainty. That's because science is a trial-and-error affair, making "essays" or attempts at evidence/-based understanding through observation, prediction, and test, but always retreating happily to the drawing board when conjectures meet refutation.

To answer some of my own DQs today:

Q: Are there any "authorities" (personal, textual, political, religious, institutional, traditional...) to whom you always and automatically defer? Can you justify this, intellectually or ethically? A: I don't think so. Whenever I feel a deferential impulse coming on I remind myself of the Emerson line about young men in libraries...

Q: Can you give an example of something you believe on the basis of probability, something else you believe because it has to be true (= follows necessarily from other premises you accept as true), and something you believe because you think it's the "best explanation")? Do you think most of your beliefs conform to one or another of these kinds of explanation? A: Hmmm... The sun will probably rise within the hour. I'm mortal. Life evolves. Yes.

Q: Do you think science makes genuine progress? Does it gradually give us a better, richer account of the natural world and our place in it? Is there a definite correlation between technology and scientific understanding? Do you think there is anything that cannot or should not be studied scientifically? Why? A: Yes, yes, yes, no. Science is a flawed instrument, because the humans who practice it are finite and fallible; but we have nothing to take its place. We shouldn't be scientistic, to the neglect of all the other tools in our kit (including poetry, literature, history, humor), but we definitely should be as scientific as we can.
==

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Descartes

Rene Descartes, not at all (Pythons notwithstanding) a "drunken fart," simply wanted to know what he could know for certain. He asked his version of the Howard Baker question. (The majority of students in my Tennessee classrooms could not identify the statesman-Senator when asked, the other day. Sigh.)

His skepticism was methodological, his goal was indubitable certainty. This, he thought, would serve the new science well. He misunderstood the self-correcting, probabilistic, fallibilistic nature of empirical reasoning. But most philosophers still think it’s worth wondering: how do you know you’re not dreaming, not being deceived by a demon or by your senses, not mistaking your own essential nature?

Still, cogito ergo sum overrates intellect. You don’t have to think, to demonstrate your existence. You just have to do something… even, as an old grad school pal used to say, if it’s wrong. (NOTE TO CLASS: I flip-flopped Descartes and his predecessor Montaigne, the anti-Descartes, on our syllabus: Descartes before the horse M. fell off of.)

Descartes' different aspects - mathematician, scientist, Catholic etc. - might suggest his split allegiance between Teams Aristotle and Plato. Both would probably like to claim him. I think he belongs with the armchair Platonists.
Reducing the operations of the universe to a series of lines,circles, numbers, and equations suited his reclusive personality. His most famous saying, “I think, therefore Iam” (cogito, ergo sum), could be stated less succinctly but more accurately as 'Because we are the only beings who do math, we rule.'
For Descartes, the essence of mind is to think, and the essence of matter is to exist-and the two never meet... we are the ghosts in the machine: souls in a world machine that operates inexorably and impersonally according to the laws of geometry and mechanics, while we operate the levers and spin the dials." The Cave and the Light

I usually think of Charles Sanders Peirce as Descartes’ most practical critic, and I agree with him that a contrived and methodological doubt is not the best starting place in philosophy.

But it occurs to me that an even more practical alternative to what I consider the misguided Cartesian quest for certainty is old Ben Franklin’s Poore Richard. His is not armchair wisdom, it comes straight from the accumulated experience of the folk. Some of that “common sense” is too common, but plenty is dead-on. “Early to bed, early to rise…” has definitely worked for me.

Still, says A.C. Grayling, "we may disagree with Descartes that the right place to start is with the private data of consciousness" rather than the shared world of language and common experience; but even if he was wrong he was "powerfully, interestingly, and importantly wrong." Russell concurs.

The thing is, the quest for certainty in philosophy tends to go hand-in-glove with the assertion of rational necessity. That, in turn, courts determinism and fatalism. Do we really want to rubber-stamp everything that happens as fated, not free? Hobbes (the contractarian and the cat) did. Calvin learned not to.





Is there anything we know or believe that we could not possibly be mistaken about, or cannot reasonably doubt? Certainly not, speaking at least for myself. But I'm next to certain that I'm more-or-less awake, at this hour, as the coffee drains.



I'm also pretty darn sure that I am (and do not "have") a body/brain. When I think of who, what, and where I am, though, the answer is interestingly complicated by all my relations (I don't just mean my familial relations): I am inclusive of a past and a future (though it keeps shrinking), and of wherever my influence (for better or worse) manages to stretch. I am vitally related by experience (actual, virtual, vicarious, possible, personal, interpersonal) to points far and wide. And, to actual physical objects in the extended world - not merely to possibilities of familiar object-like patterns of perception, as the phenomenalist has it. I'm not trapped in my skin, and we are definitely not alone in a solipsistic universe. Like Dr. Johnson, contra Berkeley, I find the pain in my toes (or hips) decidedly more substantial than an immaterial idea.

Or ghost.




I don't believe in ghosts, except metaphorically. (I am haunted by opportunities missed, possibilities unnnoticed, diems uncarped.) But most of my metaphorical spooks are Casperishly friendly (albeit incoherent, dualistically speaking). This is true of most people who read and think a lot, isn't it? We're in constant, happy communion with the dead, the remote, and the prospective members of our continuous human community. Books transport us to their realms, and to the great undiscovered country of our future.

Thursday, March 19, 2015
Pascal & the mind

Somewhere in Walden Thoreau says something about needing a little water in his world, to provide a reflective glimpse of eternity. He also has things to say to today's headliner Pascal, about not being cowed by the scale of the cosmos. Pascal famously confessed: "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." (No wonder he was frightened, say J & M.) Henry said, in reply to neighbors who wondered if he wasn't lonely out there by the lake in the woods:"Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?" Unlike his French predecessor, our transcendentalist was at home in the universe. He was less so, sadly, in the society of his peers.

Trivial pop-culture factoid: last night on "Madam Secretary," the husband (a teacher)mentioned Pascal.

Less trivially, Voltaire (we'll soon see him skewering Leibniz) intervened in the Pascal-Montaigne conflict. He called Pascal a "sublime misanthropist" whose vision of humanity as imprisoned and terrorized by the immensity and uncertainty of the cosmos was "fanatic."

Bertrand Russell mostly felt sorry for him, approvingly citing Nietzsche's critique of Pascal's "self-contempt and self-immolation." He meant Pascal's intellectual suicide, driven by fear.

Fortunately there’s much more to Blaise Pascal than his famous Wager [SEP], which we've already encountered in CoPhi.

Besides his mathematics and "Pascaline," his proto-computer, there are all those thoughts ("Pensees"-you can listen for free, here) and there’s also his antipathy for his fellow philosophe Francais, Montaigne. I usually compare-&-contrast Montaigne and Descartes, so this makes for a nice new menage a trois. Blaise is hostile to both Rene and Michel but is a cautious gambler, finding Descartes’ God too antiseptic and too, well, philosophical. And he finds Montaigne a self-absorbed, trivia-mongering potty-mouth.

But Montaigne would not at all disagree that “the heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” And isn’t it funny to think of Descartes philosophizing in his hypothetical armchair, asking if his fire and his body (etc.) are real, pretending to speculate that all the world and its philosophical problems might be figments of his solipsistic or dreamy or demon-instigated imagination? And then funnier still to come across this quote from Pascal: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But look what happens when a philosopher sits quietly in a room alone: you get the Meditations!

Pascal also said
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” And “It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.”
And
“There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.”
And
“The nature of man is wholly natural, omne animal. There is nothing he may not make natural; there is nothing natural he may not lose.”*

And
“The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me…” [Or as Jimmy Buffett says, carry the weather with you.]

And all military veterans especially should appreciate this one:
“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

And this will be an epigraph for my Philosophy Walks (or its sequel Philosophy Rides):
“Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”
Reminds me of what Montaigne said about needing to kickstart his mind with his legs.

But Pascal does finally blow the big game of life, for betting too heavily on self-interest. He’s obsessed with “saving [his] own soul at all costs.” That’s a losing proposition.

[*That statement about us being "omne animal" sounded flattering, to me, being a philosophical naturalist and a friend to animals. But later epigraphs indicate Pascal's platonist perfectionism and his derogatory attitude towards humanity and its natural condition. Without God's grace, he writes, we are "like unto the brute beasts." He doesn't seem pleased about that, but I'm with Walt Whitman: "I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd... They do not sweat and whine about their condition... They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God..."]

Julia Sweeney, donning her no-god glasses, gets to the nub of what’s wrong with Pascal’s Wager:
So how can I come up against this biggest question, the ultimate question, “Do I really believe in a personal God,” and then turn away from the evidence? How can I believe, just because I want to? How will I have any respect for myself if I did that?

I thought of Pascal’s Wager. Pascal argued that it’s better to bet there is a God, because if you’re wrong there’s nothing to lose, but if there is, you win an eternity in heaven. But I can’t force myself to believe, just in case it turns out to be true. The God I’ve been praying to knows what I think, he doesn’t just make sure I show up for church. How could I possibly pretend to believe? I might convince other people, but surely not God.
And probably not Richard Rorty, for whom philosophy is not about nailing down the unequivocal Truth but rather continuing the never-concluding Conversation of humankind.

Rorty was the most controversial philosopher on the scene back when I began grad school, having just published his brilliantly and infuriatingly iconoclastic Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Everybody had to have a view on it, and on his view that philosophy's long quest to represent "external reality" accurately was a waste of time we were free to give up. We could ditch our "comic" efforts "to guarantee this and clarify that."

Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.My current position, after several oscillations, has settled at last into the earnest wish that more philosophers wrote as wittily and as well as he did. Almost none do. Did he get pragmatism and truth right? I guess that's what he'd call a duct tape question.

Rorty, with his metaphor of mind as (cloudy) mirror, is a good segue to the discussion of philosophy of mind, also on tap today.

Dualism gets us ghosts and spirits and other non-physical entities. Scary! But not for most students, I've found, so deeply have most of them drunk from the holy communion trough. It's not a question of evidence but of familiarity and fear, in many cases - fear of the alternative. A student expressed that just the other day, asking with incredulity and contempt how anyone could possibly ponder facing the end of mortal existence without an immortal safety net firmly in place (in mind).

Why do they think the evolution of mind so closely parallels that of the brain? They don't think about it, mostly.

Nor do most think much about the possibility of mind and body being on parallel but never-converging tracks, pre-arranged to keep a synchronous schedule and never throw up a discordant discrepant "occasion." And forget too about epiphenomenalism (which Sam Harris seems to be trying hard to revive).

If neuroscientists ever succeed in mapping the brain (TED) and modeling the causal neurological events correlated with thinking, will that solve the mystery of consciousness? [John Searle's view...] Is there a gap between the explanation and the experience of pain, pleasure, happiness, etc.? I say no and yes, respectively. But let's try and draw that map, it may take us to interesting places none of us have thought about.

Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). We generally think that philosophers should be proud of their big brains, and be fans of thinking, self-reflection and rational analysis.

But there’s one philosopher, born in France in 1533, with a refreshingly different take. Michel de Montaigne was an intellectual who spent his writing life knocking the arrogance of intellectuals. In his great masterpiece, the Essays, he comes across as relentlessly wise and intelligent – but also as constantly modest and keen to debunk the pretensions of learning. Not least, he is extremely funny…: ‘to learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads… On the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.’ And, lest we forget: ‘Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.’ (SoL/BoL continues)

==

How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell...

 

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, from William Shakespeare to René Descartes, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Stephan Zweig, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Jacques Rousseau... his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?").

Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. g'r

• “The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ”
• “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
• “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
• “The thing I fear most is fear.”
• “The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”
• I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.”

==
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). It is still, tragically, sometimes assumed that the best way to cheer someone up is to tell them that everything will turn out all right; to intimate that life is essentially a pleasant process in which happiness is no mirage and human fulfilment a real possibility.

However, we need only read a few pages of the book known as the Pensées by the great French 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62) to appreciate how entirely misguided this approach must be, because Pascal pulls off the feat of being both one of the most pessimistic figures in Western thought and simultaneously one of the most cheering. The combination seems typical: the darkest thinkers are, paradoxically, almost always the ones who can lift our mood. (SoL/BoL continues)

==

French mathematician and theologian. A member of the community at Port-Royal, Pascal in the Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters) (1657) defended his Jansenist friends against the persecution of the Jesuits. In Les Pensées (Thoughts) (1665), Pascal defended a fideistic approach to religion, according to which "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." ("The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all.") Pascal's work with Fermat on the nature of probability presaged the development of modern decision theory, on the basis of which he argued that belief in god, although not rational, is a clever wager... Phil Pages

Rene Descartes (1596-1650).  After receiving a sound education in mathematics, classics, and law at La Flèche and Poitiers, René Descartes embarked on a brief career in military service with Prince Maurice in Holland and Bavaria. Unsatisfied with scholastic philosophy and troubled by skepticism of the sort expounded by Montaigne, Descartes soon conceived a comprehensive plan for applying mathematical methods in order to achieve perfect certainty in human knowledge. During a twenty-year period of secluded life in Holland, he produced the body of work that secured his philosophical reputation. Descartes moved to Sweden in 1649, but did not survive his first winter there... Philosophy Pages... 

==

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio

Tuesday (Feb.16) classes canceled

 We'll begin to catch up on Thursday. 

Darwin and Lincoln

 On Presidents' Day, on the heels of Darwin Day, a brief reflection on the Lincoln-Darwin connection and its importance for democracy. An old post:

Between Darwin and Lincoln

It's a neglected curiosity of history that two of our most monumental figures shared a birthday as well  as a dream of human progress. We're between their respective holidays today-- Darwin Day just behind us, Presidents' Day just ahead-- so it's a good time to remind ourselves of their convergent aspirations for us all.

Charles Darwin & Abe Lincoln were born on the very same day in 1809. Darwin was more than a little interested in the slavery  issue. Adrian Desmond & James Moore contend that this was a prime motive in his evolutionary researches. Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution. Darwin and Lincoln shared common roots and an "abhorrence of racial servitude and brutality..."

My colleague on freedom of dissent & protest

Worried about #Turkey's crackdowns on #demonstrators? An #MTSU #philosophy professor says you're right: no one should fear job loss or jail for speaking their minds. Tune in to "MTSU On the Record" on @WMOT_RootsRadio Tuesday night, 2/16, to hear more: https://t.co/MHK97BlzWu https://t.co/k5t7MrQvZI
(https://twitter.com/MTSUNews/status/1361372219688034304?s=02)

Dolly the uniter

Give Dolly Parton a Statue Already The Tennessee General Assembly’s vote to do so should be unanimous.

NASHVILLE — To call the Republican supermajority of the Tennessee General Assembly extremist is merely to state a fact.

These legislators have refused to expand Medicaid, a decision that is opposed by 63 percent of Tennesseans. They are considering a bill that would allow people to carry a gun without a permit, though a new poll shows that 93 percent of recent Tennessee voters support permit requirements. The General Assembly has also just reappointed a secretary of state who opposes expanding access to absentee ballots, never mind that Tennesseans shattered records by taking advantage of temporary absentee voting options during the pandemic.

It almost seems like Republican legislators don’t care what their constituents want.

In at least one respect, however, the General Assembly is in lock step with the rest of us: We love Dolly Parton, and our lawmakers love her, too. John Mark Windle, a Democrat from Livingston, is sponsoring a bill to erect a statue of Dolly Parton on the Capitol grounds at a site that faces the Ryman Auditorium, known here as the Mother Church of Country Music.

“She accepts everyone. She’s nonjudgmental,” Mr. Windle said. “She is the example of what I think a Christian ought to be.” (continues)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/opinion/tennessee-dolly-parton-statue.html?smid=em-share

Democracy in chains

Hobbes and Machiavelli were not friends of democracy.

Neither was the MTSU alum who is celebrated on our campus with a commemorative plaque, a reading room in the library, and an honors fellowship in his name: James M. Buchanan.

His story, and the threat to American democracy it represents, is dramatically told in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, the kindle version of which is currently on sale for $1.99. Everyone connected with MTSU needs to know the story, and the origins of the Political Economy Research Institute on our campus.

 

"James M. Buchanan, economist and author, received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Grandson of a former governor, he attended Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago. Buchanan's emphasis on applying market principles to political choice led to the founding of the subdiscipline of Public Choice, recognized throughout the world. Since 1983, Buchanan has been associated with George Mason University." Marker

bust