184 of 365 : I looked through my wild books yesterday -my drawing books from when I was young. How fascinating and fluid, the squirming, honest, determined grasp of life; pre-censored in many ways, pre-pre-professional. It makes me wonder about school. About motive. The distance between it and politics is most severe. Politics today is all censure. You can never be yourself, be messy, in front of people qua fellow citizens-to-be-persuaded. Makes me wonder about politics, then. The concept misses something. Our system does. And yet what would be fitting if not democracy? Yet this all goes to underline how impoverished our democracy is. How do *we* know what it is to be natural when our politics does not let us be natural?
185 / 365 : Tell me I'm not mad. Do I love flooring? Yes. It makes me appreciate many things: craft, solidity, what keeps the elements out, spring, wood, resources.
186 / 365 : Aging is an instructive process. I feel my metabolism changed. Suddenly (or so it seems), my vulnerability to disease, heart attacks, etc. comes to mind -not as likely- but as something possible. I am no longer immune like Spring (nor is Spring ever, but it is Spring to feel so, forever!).
Earth thought 187 of 365: In the beginning of Plato's Republic, Cephalus leads us to justice by explaining how old age makes the conscience more acute, provoking one to be just lest one be woken up at night in terror regarding one's prospects for the afterlife. It is a quaint hope, really a wish, that one would like to see in the world, even if the motive is self-interested (to avoid Hades). But the psychological claim is dubious. How many reach old age and soften conscience? "That was then." "Life is too short to fret." "I did the best I could." -- Conscience is, as Rousseau wrote, a weak voice, really. How much truer of ecological conscience. Which old age make one wake up in terror from that?
188 of 365 : The environment may be one place where , roughly speaking, virtue and happiness align. In this sense: if we have environmental virtue, we are more likely to preserve the environment and thereby safeguard our environmental health and our environment's meaning to us. In these ways, then, we are more likely to be happy. Environmental virtue is not sufficient for happiness, but conducive to it. And this is only roughly so -for the hurricane can still strike down the happiness of the sustainable community. Note, however, that virtue must be a feature of us, of the collective, to fulfill the link between it and happiness. The lone virtuous person, when it comes to the environment, is out of luck, for environmental problems -when caused by humans- are almost always collective problems, problems caused by many (think of toxicity; a lone polluter is not very dangerous). Individual virtue isn't consequential here, but virtue as a feature of our community (our ethos). My last question is to wonder whether social virtue is markedly different than environmental virtue just on the link to happiness. After all, the social justice activist is more likely to come up against oppression, all things considered. But the environmental conservationist is more likely to keep around health and beauty. Yet if we keep the same communal scope to virtue, this difference fades. The just "we" -the just community- is more likely to be happy. Isn't it?
