With my Cranbrook students I have just finished talking
about David Hume and his conclusion re the “original cause of all things…has no
more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold…”. This in stark contrast
to Augustine, Artistotle, and Aquinas, subjects of our previous studies, all of
whom saw “being” as a wondrous gift of radiant beauty, and “evil” as a poor sad
ringraith, skulking furtively in the shadows, clinging pitifully to a
demi-existence on the fringes of even the humblest object to claim the high
honor of being real.
I get Hume, who is the father, or at least midwife, of that
fecund skepticism that has spawned all scientific and technological achievement
in the 250 years or so since his death. But his bleak outlook on the natural world
strikes me as particularly forlorn today. It is trying to be spring in
Michigan, and I am longing for the first of the frog-choirs to reveal their
presence in the woods. Their absence, to Hume and his lot, is simply a random function
of climatological factors, but to me, it is an incipient blessing, like the interior of a church on Good Friday, or the last
moments of darkness before sunrise in the woods.
With my class I am eager to press on into more pressing
concerns, such as the various postures one can assume toward the presence of
evil. I want to explore collusion, the
impulse to “use evil to fight evil.” I am thinking of the Ring Trilogy, and of
Anakin Skywalker, and of Robert Oppenheimer. Among those whose strategy is
always that of resistance I have
already had them read Letter From a
Birmingham Jail, and I am going to show them a short video of Cornell West
calling down non-violent fire on the “terrorism” of institutional racism. I
also want to reenact the Seven Arrows story
of Coyote and How the People Learned to Camp in Circles. Can we come to
perceive the earth as a gift, and a blessing, and a song?
All the while knowing, of course, that it is also a bunch of
tectonic plates, drifting hither and yon like red-and-white bobbers floating hopefully
over a molten sea.
1 comment:
In the time of the Higgs Boson discovery, I doubt Hume would have applied the word real to a particle no one can see directly that reveals itself only after other sub-atomic particles are collided at energies close to those of the big bang. If that, and mysterious dark energy are "real", insisting that reality is limited to our repeatable perception seems a little, well, arrogant perhaps?
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