334-340: Knowing vs. acknowledging

334.365: I have been thinking of high school lately, of the assumptions of my world growing up. I grew up in Reagonite America and was a punk at a time when being so took some guts (leering, jeering, bullies, and many uninvited discussions about politics that challenged the status quo). I was lucky to attend one of the better public high schools in the United States -New Hartford High, in New Hartford, N.Y. (near Utica). My parents were exceptionally open minded for the day. And I gravitated toward biology, history and English -with natural strengths in math. So I was well-placed to learn and be schooled about our planet from a challenging perspective. Nonetheless, I grew up with the idea of freedom's infinity around me. I internalized a sense of myself as an actor -of us humans as actors- on a stage in the bright and open life of the world, daylight, or night, fresh air or rain surrounding our deeds as a condition. But not as a limit. What I mean is that while I certainly understood we had constraints on our actions due to our nature and the stage of our technology, I did not think of our actions as in a push-pull with fundamentally limited resources --but only with temporarily limited ones. I certainly did not think of my actions as in a trade-off with future generations -all innocent as far as I'm concerned. In fantasy and ignorance, once I got to college I enjoyed Phenomenology, a bastardized Spinoza, Mallarmé, and many other figures of infinity. 1989.

Now, my pervasive feeling's that action is a trade-off against the future, against other forms of life. Not all such trade offs loom unjustified -many sit quite justified. There are ways to set the future up. Still, not so many --not so fast-- as long as we exist within the industrial age and its energy / engineering paradigm. Oh, I exist now as a tethered, negotiating being who doesn't identify with the pure fantasy of a wide open stage of freedom.

335.365: What do we make when the counter-example has been avoided? Imagine an ethics book in which not a single thorough argument is given. Instead, facile characterizations of opposing positions are offered. Perhaps a rights-based thinker is painted as "wanting rigid rules" -the implication being that this is irresponsible given the ambiguous flux of experience. But tell that to the journalist illegally imprisoned and tortured in a despotic regime -- "You're being rigid." "Your trauma will increase life's ambiguity." The counter-example has been avoided. Critical thinking and scholarship -- depth-consideration of objections; documentation of evidence; the patient, thorough exploring of reasons -- originate there, in the counter-example. And institutions can deliver on this -or fail to. For instance, when I was at Yale, I saw the institution fail to deliver critical thinking in many cases. Who wants a counter-example when Goldman Sachs beckons and "Rocks for Jocks" is considered a legitimate class? However, when I was at University of Chicago, I saw the institution succeed in rendering objectivity a palpable value with across-the-board commitment in the curricular structure of the institution -the vaunted common core. This problem is echoed among environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, too, with romantic environmentalists eschewing objectivity for feeling, and the hedonists of the corporate world discounting long-term concerns because cocaine and sex beckon.

Of course, much of what I say admits of counter-example. And I haven't given evidence, have I? Just so, this fragment --these entire Earth thoughts of a year-- are not critical thinking *yet*.

336.365: Big bright day, and around us, electric lights.

337.365: Thankful for an atmosphere that isn't 3 degrees ( C ) warmer than it is. (Gratitude I won't be able to have by the time I'm expected to die, and which any of my descendants will count as part of the Golden Age?) But that -this feeling- is hardly Thanksgiving. The holiday should leave one replenished, ready to live some more. And how does one find that sentiment within sharp awareness of a passing chance? I am thinking: through what Cavell calls "acknowledgment", rather than through knowledge -and not, as Kierkegaard thought, through faith. In my words: through relational reason. By being held, holding, a friend and family affection, by being caught up in the great -- since modest-- reconciler and unknown: togetherness.

338.365: Yesterday, I didn't find what I'm grateful for in a way that left me free. So I will try again today. I am grateful for living in this point of time and for Isaiah, Elaine, my parents, Ruthie -- Steve, Stuart, and all my friends living in this point of time. For Allen, who is a true colleague, and for my colleagues at work, and for work, and for my health, and for the great globe of life that makes us all possible. And for my teachers, too, who helped me see all this. Gratitude is an outpouring, and once it comes, it comes flowing out. Action is an outpouring, too, and once it comes, it comes flowing out. When will we unfreeze action to prevent our Earth's destruction? When we do -when that action is *like* gratitude, *born* of gratitude and an acute sense of loss, a new world will come pouring out.

339.365: "What sane reason could there be for moving away from this paradise? I think I may have felt a glimmer of madness, with no concept for the feeling." (Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know -Excerpts from Memory, 2010, July 7, 2003) And we exist in this mad age. Crutzen calls the geology the Anthropocene. And we, inside human history, should call our era within the Anthropocene, "The Blindness". It is the era in which we denied reality, would not acknowledge our home on Earth, with its limits and tricks and benefits. Its limits, tricks, and benefits -LTBs- and we, mad as can be, but lacking a concept for the feeling of this blissed out, anxious, half-irritated, mostly ecstatic existence inside our malls, cars, and short-sighted states.

Outside, in the "non-developed" world ("non-developed"?!), the silence is both calm and unsettling, with sadness admixed. Looking at the shining bubble of "globalization", at the Blindness, one hardly knows what to think, since the Earth, clearly, is changing. You can't Pollute and Destroy ad nauseum without consequence.

340. 365: What kind of government can represent future generations?

[Tokisdotis –“toe-kiss-dah-tiss”- movie #1 ]