Today, we are all about our pronouns. This incidental part of speech has suddenly replaced the noun and the verb as the focus of popular, and linguistic, attention.

Growing up in the ‘60s, we were accustomed to asking one another, “What is your sign?” Now, 55 years later, “What are your pronouns?” has become the ice breaker of choice. Even some business colleagues of mine have embedded “my pronouns…” into their electronic email signatures.

Someone sent me this and it’s so good I had to reproduce it in Thoughts while Shaving:

“The beginning of Deuteronomy is filled with promises about taking possession of the land of Canaan. But…remember that our ancestors lost possession of that land and went into exile. The Torah teaches that the way to live long in the land and avoid exile is not by having the strongest army, but by fulfilling the covenant of the Torah. And it tells us that one mitzvah is most important for making this happen: the Sabbatical or Shmita year, when the land rests.

Most young children are afraid of the dark. As adults, we tend to dismiss those fears. But as in so many other ways, it is the children who are right…and we who are wrong. They have not yet wrapped themselves in the cocoon of consumer goods. They still see life as it is.

Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd.

Since I was 12 years old, I have found Greek Mythology baffling. What exactly is the role of the gods? I told my grandchildren that the Greek gods are like our Super Heroes, but even that analogy didn’t totally satisfy me. Now, more than half a century later, I think I’ve figured it out (with a major assist from Oswald Spengler). In Ancient Greece it is the gods who act, not the people. Individuals go through the motions, but their intentions are meaningless and their actions entirely without effect.

According to Existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, each of us has been “thrown” into an alien and potentially hostile world. It is as if an ocean suddenly disgorged us onto a strange beach populated by strange creatures. But of course, it’s much worse than that because initially we don’t know what a beach, or even a creature, is and we have no previous life experience to draw on.

Have you ever made a mistake and then repeated the same mistake years later? Well, the British government has. In 1776, they underestimated the determination of the American people to be independent of Britain. Then, approximately 250 years later, they underestimated the determination of their own people to be independent of Continental Europe (the EU).

I hope our British cousins will celebrate America’s Independence with us on July 4th. I know I will celebrate the UK’s independence with them on January 31.

Happy 4th everyone!

In his seminal work, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (c. 1920) both predicts and explains the global conflict in which we are now embroiled. He divides world history into a number of distinct “ cultures/civilizations”. That’s not unique to Spengler. What is unique is the classification scheme he uses. For example, he speaks of a Magian culture and a Faustian culture.

The existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, defined “art” as anything that shows us something new about the world, ourselves, or our place in that world. Most of us think we gain new insights through expository prose (like mine). What a paltry palette that gives us! Sure, expository prose can teach us much…but not that much. The medium of expository language is extraordinarily limited.

The Germans, wow! Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Heidegger – each one turned philosophy and/or intellectual history on its head. (How many heads are there – apparently a lot more than we once thought.) Spengler, for instance, offers a totally novel interpretation of Western culture and world history. There are some weak points but overall it is both eye-popping and prophetic.

In an earlier post, we talked about the need to think ‘complementarily’ in order to understand the cosmos and our place in it. We spoke, for example, of the need to understand sub-atomic entities as both waves and particles. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, we need to think of the entire universe in such terms.

The Gospel of Matthew (18:3) quotes Jesus as saying, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Why not? What is it that little children have that we don’t? Turns out, little children have an ability that almost all of us have lost: the ability to hold several different, and superficially inconsistent, models of reality at the same time.