Category Archives: Rationalism

PARIS James Reed was devastated by a work-related burnout and in desperate need of someone to guide him. The wildlife documentary filmmaker was exhausted by film shoots, unable to take care of his son and felt like a dried-up spectator watching the world fly by. It was the early 2010s and in a last-ditch attempt to find existential meaning, he turned to his childhood passion for diving. Floating among the underwater kelp forests, he met an unexpected mentor and his life took an unlikely turn. While gradually beginning to feel alive again, Reed crossed paths with a small, fearful octopus."I felt that this creature was really special, it could teach me something, it had a particular trick. So I had this crazy idea: What if I went there every day... every day without exception?"

Which is exactly what he did, always in the company of his video camera. My Octopus Teacher, co-directed with Pippa Ehrlich and released on Netflix in 2020, is the purposely uplifting tale of an encounter between a human being with nothing to cling to and an octopus with many suckers.

"It taught me to feel that we're part of this place, that we were not just visitors," narrates the voice of Reed, who has fallen in love with a creature in perfect symbiosis with her environment.His film, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary on April 25, is an invitation to recognize other forms of intelligence. When presented with these emotionally-charged images, it seems incontestable that this strong-armed and cunning being knows how to play and strategize. This animal intelligence is all the more humbling as the little octopus, whose mother dies shortly after its birth, must learn everything by itself without the natural transfer of social knowledge.

"In Jules Verne's time, the octopus was an evil beast. This was because it was morphologically very different from us, a frightening prospect. Today, we realize that it's closer than we thought," says neurobiologist and philosopher Georges Chapouthier, author of Sauver l'homme par l'animal ("Saving Man Through the Animal World"). "There are already similarities when it comes to its aptitudes, vision and prehension. She [the octopus] is able to unscrew a jar, to reach her goal by way of a detour and to use coconuts as a shield. While we have long thought that intelligence was the prerogative of vertebrates, the observation that complex cognitive abilities can be developed in other groups invites us to put things into perspective."

Navigating troubled waters at the confluence of reality and myth, this blue-blooded animal is, as writer and art historian Pierre Pigot points out in his book Le Chant du Kraken ("The Song of the Kraken"), "a creature of the rift and the threshold," which "reappears when civilization becomes afraid of its reflection in the mirror." As humans begin to understand that their hegemonic rationalism is leading them straight to catastrophe, the need to re-establish an intimate dialogue with other living beings arises. For this, we need tutors and mediating entities. Consequently, the furious squid that haunted the imaginations of the 19th century has given way to a kind of "octobuddy" that we would gladly invite to drinks.

As a means of reconciliation between the human and the animal world, our slimy new friend is suddenly everywhere. Is it a coincidence that we've started playing Squids Odyssey on our smartphones a game whose heroes are adventurous little cuttlefish and that our subway neighbor is reading Erin Hortle's novel, L'Octopus et moi ("The octopus and I")? Is it just a coincidence that our children are watching the Octonauts, an animated series in which one of the main characters is an anthropomorphic, oceanographer octopus? Is it a coincidence when our colleagues have been embellishing their messages with tentacle emojis for weeks, or teleworking at the Parisian bistro Le Poulpe?

"Through education, what we have learned above all are the abstract and technological cognitive aspects, which we find in languages or mathematics and are carried out by the left hemisphere," says Chapouthier. "But humans also have emotional aptitudes leading to altruism and empathy, which we do not develop as much and is perhaps one of the defects of our societies. However, the essence of an animal thought is a thought without language, a thought of emotion, something that should be within our interest because it allows us to reconnect and leave the moral bankruptcy of the human species behind."

James Reed, Pippa Erlich (left) and Marlee Matlin with the Oscar for Documentary Feature Photo: Matt Petit/AMPAS/ZUMA Wire/ZUMAPRESS.com

Today, talking about octopi on LinkedIn is not an aberration. Quite the contrary: it is now inspiring, just as the late Steve Jobs' turtlenecks were in their time. "It immediately creates sympathy and adds value," says Caecilia Finck-Dijoux, 50, who specializes in business consulting. "When I founded my company with my partner, we were looking for a name related to the sea. As we are both divers, the octopus appeared an obvious choice to us. But, in French, the word has a soft side. So we chose the English term and we called ourselves 'Octopus Marketing'. It seemed interesting to us to identify ourselves with this animal that has several tentacles because, through our consulting activity, we bring additional arms to the client. In addition, like the octopus, which is forgotten in its environment, I love to blend into the processes of companies where I intervene."

But what does the octopus have to teach us or reteach us anyway? Perhaps, quite simply, how to believe. Where our species only sees dead ends, this contortionist becomes a master of escape driven by "An almost Kafkaesque conviction: there is always a way out," says philosopher Vinciane Despret, author of Autobiographie d'un poulpe ("Autobiography of an octopus"). They possess an admirable drive for life that expresses itself through a singular way of inhabiting the world, based on camouflage, behavioral mimicry and the science of dodging. If the octopi suddenly start to write, it would not just be propelled not by their poetic nature but rather due to a new threat forcing them to evolve.

"The question of extinction has been haunting me for some time, and that's what I've been trying to unfold in a non-tragic fictional mode. All these animals that are disappearing, that we won't see anymore, how are we going to leave something of them? This is what haunts me," confides Despret. Her octopus-fiction is all the more disturbing considering that, in reality, the genre's animal muse is not really in the process of disappearing. In fact, the population of cephalopods has increased immensely in the last sixty years.

Surfing on the expressive potential of ink and foraying into other mediums the octopus acts as a muse for another species, creatures who produce creative output on a massive scale in order to ward off their fear of extinction. We'll let you guess which one.

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How The Octopus Conquered Humanity - Worldcrunch

During lockdown, the ability to go for short walks was for many a source of solace, as earlier in the year we saw the spring flowers appearing and the trees beginning to bud. Now with most restrictions lifted, we return to Scotlands hills, lochs and wild places, delighted to be among them once again.

When writing about nature in the third decade of the 21st century however, it is hard to experience its beauty and to delight in the pleasure that it gives us without also thinking about all the threats to its survival.

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Our harmful impact on it became quickly apparent during lockdown when, in the absence of normal human activity, we saw how quickly nature began to regenerate itself.

Ecologist and author Richard Mabey summed this up perfectly when he said that nature is doing marvellously well without us. It is vital that we cease to treat nature as an infinite resource which is at our disposal and ours to use at will. We should take from it only what it can sustainably give.

The beginning of the 19th century saw a flowering of the Romantic movement in the arts. It was a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on logic and intellect, which preceded it.

Nature became vitally important particularly in art and poetry and writers such as Wordsworth and Thoreau wrote of the spirituality that arose from the affinity they found in nature.

In art, landscape painting became important both here and on the Continent. In Scotland, Alexander Nasmyth began to paint landscapes and is considered to be the 19th-century initiator of a tradition which has continued down to the present day.

In fact, nature is a common theme in both Scotlands art and poetry. I look forward to visiting the Turner watercolours which are exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery in January each year.

No matter how many times I return, I still stand in awe before them. In one work, nature is all movement, wildness and drama with its endlessly shifting shapes, while another draws me into the serenity at its heart.

From the lyrical 18th-century Epistle to Davie In days when daisies deck the ground, And blackbirds whistle clear, With honest joy our hearts will bound by Robert Burns through to poets of the present day, nature is a recurrent theme.

In the introduction to the 2005 anthology of his poetry, Norman MacCaig is quoted as saying landscape is my religion and animals, birds and reptiles make frequent appearances.

In the poem Stars and Planets, he describes the beauty of the night sky, then subverts the poetic imagery in the last verse: Its hard to think that the Earth is one , This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters, Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters, Attended only by the loveless moon.

Music too looks to the natural world for inspiration. Orkney-based composer the late Peter Maxwell Davies spent three weeks on the British Antarctic base at Rothera.

Afterwards he composed his Antarctic Symphony, distilling the essence of what he called this terrible, hostile wonderland into the piece. I visited Antarctica in 2011 it truly was the experience of a lifetime and something I will never forget. I loved the remoteness the silence broken only by the wind, the penguin cries, the sea breaking on the rocks and the occasional crack of splintering ice, with sea, snow, ice and sky spreading as far as the eye could see.

That there are creatures here which have managed to make such amazing adaptations in order to survive these extreme conditions fills me with wonder and makes me feel how very insignificant human beings are by comparison.

I have tried to convey these feelings in my paintings of the landscape as well as the more intimate studies of the Antarctic wildlife. On an ecological note, current ice loss in Antarctica is seen as a key indicator of climate change.

For me, a connection with nature is fundamental to my own well-being and my work as an artist. The changing seasons with their colours, scents and sounds have a unique impact upon my moods, thoughts and feelings.

Stilled by sitting by a gently flowing river or overawed by the majesty of a thunderstorm, I find that nature communicates with an immediacy unparalleled by anything else.

The infinite variety of shape and form within nature fascinates me, like the curve of a leaf, the complicated twisting of roots, the patterns made by falling leaves. Much of my work is based on an observation of nature in one form or another as my starting point for a painting often grows out of drawings from my sketchbooks.

The experience of lockdown when we had little contact with nature served only to emphasise its importance. In the scheme of things, this was a relatively short period to be out of touch with nature. How much worse will this be if it is lost forever?

Annie Broadley is an Edinburgh-based artist. To see more of her work visit her website, anniebroadley.com.

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Covid lockdown reminded us of how nature is both an artistic and intellectual inspiration Annie Broadley - The Scotsman

How we remember the pandemic will depend on how it ends. Yet there is one assumption that is already taken as self-evident: that the crisis will change the world. It seems perverse, given how Covid-19 has so violently shaken the planet, to imagine that things could simply revert to how they were. We assume that a world-historical moment such as this must reverberate for decades if not centuries. But what if its effects really are fleeting? What if the old order quickly reasserts itself? What if we forget?

It is not that far-fetched a proposition. The 1918 flu pandemic, at least until a resurgence of interest among historians and artists in the past 10 years, was largely written out of the history of the 20th century, its sweeping impact between 50 and 100 million dead customarily relegated to a footnote in the story of the World War with which it coincided. It receded quickly from public discourse in the 1920s and in the absence of memorials, museums or even a neat narrative arc that might have attracted novelists and film-makers, its place in collective memory quickly faded.

Even allowing for the capriciousness of public remembering, however, the Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to slip as easily from the mind. Thanks to its scale and the technologies at our disposal, it is probably the most extensively chronicled crisis in human history. While the larger ecological disaster we know is coming will shape our memory of this one, it will surely leave a mark on those who lived through it. So the question is less whether we will remember it than how.

To say that there can be no going back to business as usual is, for the moment, wishful thinking. We may wish for cities to become more liveable, for daily life to slow down and for the crisis to usher in a new era of co-operation and solidarity. It is certainly easier to imagine these things today than it was a year ago. But change on that scale would require the crisis to produce a fundamental shift in how people think, whereas much of the evidence so far suggests that, rather than forging a new sensibility, it has merely reinforced peoples existing views.

The liberal internationalist sees the horrendously unequal effects of the crisis as proof of the need for global institutions, whereas the nationalist looks at the competition for medical supplies and vaccines and finds an argument for nimble states free from the strictures of supranational bureaucracies. The left cheers the state for living up to its responsibility through large-scale interventions to keep people safe and supported, whereas the right looks at the development of life-saving vaccines by profit-chasing pharma companies as proof of the genius of free-market capitalism.

The budding autocrat observes Chinas swift top-down suppression of the virus with admiration. The democrat sees how Beijing has ramped up surveillance and shut down questions on the origins of the virus and feels nothing but fear. In much the same way, Covid-19 denialists are not recent converts from the school of scientific rationalism; they had clocked well before the pandemic that everyone was out to get them.

If this one follows the pattern of previous crises, it is more likely to accelerate trends that were already under way than to mark an abrupt rupture in itself. The world was turning inward before the pandemic struck. After the financial crisis, the growth in global trade had slowed and protectionism was spreading. Democracy was in retreat, autocrats were emboldened. Technology was enabling more and more people to work alone in front of their screens. In politics, the pandemic may (with any luck) have finished the careers of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, but it will have done so only by highlighting pre-existing incompetence.

It seems counterintuitive to think that a crisis like this, which so clearly underlined the need to remove barriers to transnational co-operation, could instead produce new ones. But so far that has been the pattern. Authoritarian regimes have seized on the crisis to crush dissent and develop more intrusive ways of spying on their citizens. Democratic states, including the United States and Hungary, have used it as a pretext to tighten broader controls and admit fewer immigrants. Across Europe, governments have sought to limit exports of food and medical products, to seal borders and assume once unthinkable powers over peoples lives.

For a case study in how crises can be wasted, their lessons quickly forgotten, we need only look back to 2008 and the shock that was supposed to herald a fundamental rethink of the market economy. The rebalancing that many hoped for never materialised; instead most governments simply slashed their spending on public services. Viewed from the top floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, the world that emerged 10 years on looked reassuringly familiar.

The pandemic may not be forgotten, but to remember is not necessarily to learn, still less to change.

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World View: Dont be so sure that Covid will change the world - The Irish Times

The Artistic Company "Creatists" having in its assets a series of important music and theatrical producers, presents the theatrical performance "Karaiskakis: The Misunderstood Hero", the historical drama of Giannis Kostaras directed by Manos Antoniou, which tours in Attica and selected stations region.

First stop in Attica at the Petra Theater on Sunday, July 25, 2021 at 21:30.

A few words about the project

The play concerns the life and work of Georgios Karaiskakis, the pioneer of the Greek Revolution. The peculiarity of the work is that the main character, Karaiskakis, is presented in writing without any mood of beautification and heroism, but his approach is based on sociological and psychological elements, a result of months of research on his face, which gave the project the opportunity to include scenes that bring to life real events with the originality of the dialogues written in the spoken language of the Revolution.

The play collaborates with other arts besides acting, which in full agreement with the direction of Manos Antonios balances between symbolism and realism. From the form of the narrator in the work, the character "Karaiskakis" is created, who sometimes as "angel" and sometimes as "devil" combines black and white, light and darkness. The direction analyzes the second and third semantic levels of the work, without standing on a superficial form of the hero, but traveling the viewer from 1821 until today through semantic concepts and atmospheric lighting. The music and songs of the show are signed by the internationally renowned accordion musician and soloist Zoe Tiganouria.

The play "Karaiskakis - The misunderstood hero" by Giannis Kostaras, is published by Papadimitropoulos Publications.

Directional note

The play "Karaiskakis - The misunderstood hero" has been built on a triple axis: the value, the historical and the sociological-dramatic. Initially, there was a written will to capture and transmit some values, as well as the "fearless" character of Karaiskakis to the people of today, which is based on nihilism and debauchery.

Then, due to studies and interests on the part of the creator, weight was given through and careful study of sources of that time, to the revival of events and sounds, whether it is the language or the songs included in the plot, which have become almost unknown today. .

Of course, because the main goal was not from the beginning ethics, rationalism or the "hollow" national uprising, additionally unknown aspects of the Greek Revolution are revealed, but also of Karaiskakis' life so that they end up through his phrase that haunts the whole work "Whenever I want I am an angel, whenever I want I am hell "in the dipole of this character, of the Greeks as a nation, as of each individual, one would say; in order to reconcile in part the national liberation and only views of the Revolution by some historians with those on the other , and as the predominant one of Kordatos, which gave a more social tone.

The identity of the show

"Karaiskakis: The Misunderstood Hero"

Historical drama

Duration: 100 minutes

Credits

Writing- Historical research: Giannis KostarasDirected by: Manos AntoniouMusic editing: Zoe TiganouriaDance teaching: Mika StefanakiSets: MarceloCostumes: Magda KalemiAssistant director: Thanasis Skopas

The actors interpret: Makis Arvanitakis, Konstantinos Bazas, Konstantinos Zografopoulos, Giannis Kostaras, Konstantinos Spyropoulos, Iordanis Kalesis, Elias Menagier, Thanasis Skopas.

In the role of narrator o Costas Arzoglou and in the role of Karaiskakis o Manos Antoniou. In the role of Golf is Ioanna Pilichou and in the role of Mario the Filitsa Kalogerakou.

Day and time of the showSunday 25 July 2021 on 21: 30Watch Time: 20: 30

Ticket priceNormal: 15 euroReduced (Unemployed, Disabled, Student, Large Children): 12 euroTickets pre-sale: Ticket Services

Petra TheaterRomilias 1, St. Petersburg

The show is held in collaboration with "EXALEIPTRON", Piraeus Women's Group, for the Arts, Letters, Culture and Sciences and is under its auspices.

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"Karaiskakis: The Misunderstood Hero" at the Petra Theater on July 25 - 9.84

Dwayne Walls Jr.

By Dwayne Walls Jr., Columnist

On this past Sunday we celebrated our 245th year of independence from British kings. In the spirit of the day I would like to share some words from a man who was there at the start of the fight.

Sixty-seven years after Lexington and Concord, 91-year-old Levi Preston, who was from Danvers, Massachusetts, and who had been a Minute Man, was interviewed by a young Dartmouth student named Mellen Chamberlain about the so-called English oppressions that had caused the war. By the time of Chamberlains interview in 1842, Preston had come to be regarded as an historical oddity and living relic of the past.

Captain Preston, asked Chamberlain, why did you go to the Concord Fight, the 19th of April, 1775?

Why did I go?

Yes, my histories tell me that you men of the Revolution took up arms against intolerable oppressions. What were they?

I didnt feel them.

What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?

I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William [in the harbor]. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them.

Well then, what about the Tea Tax?

Tea Tax! I never drank a cup of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.

Then I suppose you were reading Sydney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?

Never heard of em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts Psalms and Hymns and the Almanac.

Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to fight?

Young man, said Preston, What we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to govern ourselves. They didnt mean we should.

Here we see the cause of the American Revolution laid bare. Strip away the lustrous veneer of 18th Century notions like Rationalism and Enlightenment and we see once again that all politics is local, to quote the former Speaker of the House, Thomas Tip ONeil.

This conversation also gives us a clear idea of one unexpected facet of the American Revolution: revolutions are not always caused by revolutionary ideas. Ours was a conservative venture fought to resist the growing power of the British state. There were appeals to the King about the oppression of Parliament; there were appeals to Parliament for relief from the King; there were appeals to the Courts based on colonial Charters.

Only after these complaints about the violation of the rights of Englishmen were exhausted did Americans begin to talk about the natural rights of man, what we now call human rights. Natural law was much safer ground. It was ambiguous, and it was fashionable at the time, and natural law was moral, since it was based in a faith on God and in the perfection of his creation. People accepted it as one of the self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Paine of Virginia, Founding Father and author of the pamphlet Common Sense, described the new republican spirit: What we formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons or an alteration of local circumstances. They rose and fell like things of course, and had nothing in their existence or their fate that could influence beyond the spot that produced them.

But revolutions are much like a snowball rolling downhill: they may start small, but they soon grow to an avalanche, and probably the most remarkable aspect of the American Revolution is that it soon ceased to be a revolution. To be sure, political and social divisions still existed after the shooting stopped, but there was no guillotine, no Terror as there was following the French Revolution, nor was there civil war as after the Russian Revolution.

Instead of going to a gulag, men like Levi Preston went home, where they were free to work their fields and raise their children and worship their God without some unseen authority across the Atlantic Ocean telling them what to do.

Personally, I cannot imagine being ruled by a king. I probably would have picked up a musket, too.

Dwayne Walls Jr. has previously written a story about his late fathers battle with Alzheimers disease and a first-person recollection of 9/11 for the newspaper. Walls is the author of the book Backstage at the Lost Colony. He and his wife Elizabeth live in Pittsboro.

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Reflecting on the Revolution - The Chatham News + Record

What follows here is a long running Q.A. with Tom about his new Galatians commentary. Buckle up as it will be an exciting ride.

Q. Lets talk for a minute about spiritual formation, a buzz word phrase if there ever was one. One of the things I have found so puzzling is the attempt to place spiritual formation in one category, and profound study of Gods word in another. Sometimes it even sounds like a sort of gnostic de-historicizing of the Gospel to me. People talk, at least here in America, about devotional study of Gods word on the one hand and serious academic study on the other. The former you do in your quiet time, the latter you do in your study or in a course etc. Now it seems to me that Paul would not have been happy about these sorts of bifurcations. I believe the Word of God is living and active and does the forming of us, though of course that is not the only way it happens. Deep interaction with Gods Word is a type of spiritual formation, including in the original languages, by reading good commentaries etc. Yes, we need to learn to apply the Word, as a word on target to various aspects of our lives, but we must understand what we are applying first. I wonder if you share some of my frustrations with the attempt to make spiritual formation a separate field of study, or discipline at the expense of cutting to the application chase too quickly? I always thought of hermeneutics not as spiritual formation, but rather the basic rules of interpreting the text, but now people are lumping it together with application and spiritual formation.

A. Yes indeed and thats one of the reasons I was happy to have a crack at this commentary within Eerdmans new series. What were seeing, of course, is the long outworking of the split culture of the Enlightenment, including the split within the Enlightenment world between rationalism and romanticism. In fact I think thats particularly true in America (not so much here): its partly the left-brain/right-brain thing, partly the victory in Myers-Briggs terms of the ISTJ over the ENFP, and so on. This has played out in the US in terms of seminaries/div schools versus departments of religion, though of course there are cross-overs within that as well. For me, its a matter of the fourfold amor Dei loving God with heart, mind, soul and strength. There has been MASSIVE resistance in many quarters of the spiritual direction or renewal world to bringing the mind into the equation, not least because those who have insisted on the mind have often done so in order to drive a rationalist coach and horses through any sense that this stuff might actually matter at a deeply personal level. Other divisions come in here too . . . getting people to heaven versus doing social work, and so on. This could all be mapped I guess, though the terrain shifts this way and that. But I think you and I are pretty much on the same page with this.

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NT Wright's Galatians Part Two | Ben Witherington - Patheos

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldnt understand the role of caffeine in my life its invisible yet pervasive power without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the worlds leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of caffeine withdrawal included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadnt begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same.

For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of fizzy drinks). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. Its so pervasive that its easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.

The scientists have spelled out, and I had duly noted, the predictable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: headache, fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, decreased motivation, irritability, intense distress, loss of confidence and dysphoria. But beneath that deceptively mild rubric of difficulty concentrating hides nothing short of an existential threat to the work of the writer. How can you possibly expect to write anything when you cant concentrate?

I postponed it as long as I could, but finally the dark day arrived. According to the researchers Id interviewed, the process of withdrawal had actually begun overnight, while I was sleeping, during the trough in the graph of caffeines diurnal effects. The days first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power its joy! not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal. This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. Its mode of action, or pharmacodynamics, mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterdays cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.

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At the coffee shop, instead of my usual half caff, I ordered a cup of mint tea. And on this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived. The fog settled over me and would not budge. Its not that I felt terrible I never got a serious headache but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound.

I was able to do some work, but distractedly. I feel like an unsharpened pencil, I wrote in my notebook. Things on the periphery intrude, and wont be ignored. I cant focus for more than a minute.

Over the course of the next few days, I began to feel better, the veil lifted, yet I was still not quite myself, and neither, quite, was the world. In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too. Mornings were the worst. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep. That reconsolidation of self took much longer than usual, and never quite felt complete.

Humanitys acquaintance with caffeine is surprisingly recent. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this molecule remade the world. The changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a fundamental level the level of the human mind. Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.

By the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in east Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. Initially, the new drink was regarded as an aide to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dozing off during their religious observances. (Tea, too, started out as a little helper for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.) Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than 600 of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman empire.

The Islamic world at this time was in many respects more advanced than Europe, in science and technology, and in learning. Whether this mental flourishing had anything to do with the prevalence of coffee (and prohibition of alcohol) is difficult to prove, but as the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, the beverage seemed to be tailor-made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics.

In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish immigrant. They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated: within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every 200 Londoners.

To call the English coffeehouse a new kind of public space doesnt quite do it justice. You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation was free. (Coffeehouses were often referred to as penny universities.) After visiting London coffeehouses, a French writer named Maximilien Misson wrote, You have all Manner of News there; You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you dont care to spend more.

Londons coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. So, for example, merchants and men with interests in shipping gathered at Lloyds Coffee House. Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyds Coffee House eventually became the insurance brokerage Lloyds of London. Learned types and scientists known then as natural philosophers gathered at the Grecian, which became closely associated with the Royal Society; Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley debated physics and mathematics here, and supposedly once dissected a dolphin on the premises.

The conversation in Londons coffee houses frequently turned to politics, in vigorous exercises of free speech that drew the ire of the government, especially after the monarchy was restored in 1660. Charles II, worried that plots were being hatched in coffeehouses, decided that the places were dangerous fomenters of rebellion that the crown needed to suppress. In 1675 the king moved to close down the coffeehouses, on the grounds that the false, malicious and scandalous Reports emanating therefrom were a Disturbance of the Quiet and Peace of the Realm. Like so many other compounds that change the qualities of consciousness in individuals, caffeine was regarded as a threat to institutional power, which moved to suppress it, in a foreshadowing of the wars against drugs to come.

But the kings war against coffee lasted only 11 days. Charles discovered that it was too late to turn back the tide of caffeine. By then the coffeehouse was such a fixture of English culture and daily life and so many eminent Londoners had become addicted to caffeine that everyone simply ignored the kings order and blithely went on drinking coffee. Afraid to test his authority and find it lacking, the king quietly backed down, issuing a second proclamation rolling back the first out of princely consideration and royal compassion.

Its hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffeehouses of both France and England in the 17th century would ever have developed in a tavern. The kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began to yield to a new spirit of rationalism and, a bit later, Enlightenment thinking. French historian Jules Michelet wrote: Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.

To see, lucidly, the reality of things: this was, in a nutshell, the rationalist project. Coffee became, along with the microscope, telescope and the pen, one of its indispensable tools.

After a few weeks, the mental impairments of withdrawal had subsided, and I could once again think in a straight line, hold an abstraction in my head for more than two minutes, and shut peripheral thoughts out of my field of attention. Yet I continued to feel as though I was mentally just slightly behind the curve, especially when in the company of drinkers of coffee and tea, which, of course, was all the time and everywhere.

Heres what I was missing: I missed the way caffeine and its rituals used to order my day, especially in the morning. Herbal teas which are barely, if at all, psychoactive lack the power of coffee and tea to organise the day into a rhythm of energetic peaks and valleys, as the mental tide of caffeine ebbs and flows. The morning surge is a blessing, obviously, but there is also something comforting in the ebb tide of afternoon, which a cup of tea can gently reverse.

At some point I began to wonder if perhaps it was all in my head, this sense that I had lost a mental step since getting off coffee and tea. So I decided to look at the science, to learn what, if any, cognitive enhancement can actually be attributed to caffeine. I found numerous studies conducted over the years reporting that caffeine improves performance on a range of cognitive measures of memory, focus, alertness, vigilance, attention and learning. An experiment done in the 1930s found that chess players on caffeine performed significantly better than players who abstained. In another study, caffeine users completed a variety of mental tasks more quickly, though they made more errors; as one paper put it in its title, people on caffeine are faster, but not smarter. In a 2014 experiment, subjects given caffeine immediately after learning new material remembered it better than subjects who received a placebo. Tests of psychomotor abilities also suggest that caffeine gives us an edge: in simulated driving exercises, caffeine improves performance, especially when the subject is tired. It also enhances physical performance on such metrics as time trials, muscle strength and endurance.

True, there is reason to take these findings with a pinch of salt, if only because this kind of research is difficult to do well. The problem is finding a good control group in a society in which virtually everyone is addicted to caffeine. But the consensus seems to be that caffeine does improve mental (and physical) performance to some degree.

Whether caffeine also enhances creativity is a different question, however, and theres some reason to doubt that it does. Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. It may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeines big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.

The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

What coffee did for clerks and intellectuals, tea would soon do for the English working class. Indeed, it was tea from the East Indies heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. We think of England as a tea culture, but coffee, initially the cheaper beverage by far, dominated at first.

Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker.

To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a mandarin); seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk. The introduction of tea to the west was all about exploitation the extraction of surplus value from labour, not only in its production in India, but in its consumption by the British as well.

Tea allowed the British working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in it became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer.) The caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the machine. It is difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.

So how exactly does coffee, and caffeine more generally, make us more energetic, efficient and faster? How could this little molecule possibly supply the human body energy without calories? Could caffeine be the proverbial free lunch, or do we pay a price for the mental and physical energy the alertness, focus and stamina that caffeine gives us?

Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job and keeping us feeling alert. But adenosine levels continue to rise, so that when the caffeine is eventually metabolised, the adenosine floods the bodys receptors and tiredness returns. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back.

For as long as people have been drinking coffee and tea, medical authorities have warned about the dangers of caffeine. But until now, caffeine has been cleared of the most serious charges against it. The current scientific consensus is more than reassuring in fact, the research suggests that coffee and tea, far from being deleterious to our health, may offer some important benefits, as long as they arent consumed to excess. Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinsons disease, dementia and possibly depression and suicide. (Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and rates of suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day.)

My review of the medical literature on coffee and tea made me wonder if my abstention might be compromising not only my mental function but my physical health, as well. However, that was before I spoke to Matt Walker.

An English neuroscientist on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, Walker, author of Why We Sleep, is single-minded in his mission: to alert the world to an invisible public-health crisis, which is that we are not getting nearly enough sleep, the sleep we are getting is of poor quality, and a principal culprit in this crime against body and mind is caffeine. Caffeine itself might not be bad for you, but the sleep its stealing from you may have a price. According to Walker, research suggests that insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimers disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide and obesity. The shorter you sleep, he bluntly concludes, the shorter your lifespan.

Walker grew up in England drinking copious amounts of black tea, morning, noon and night. He no longer consumes caffeine, save for the small amounts in his occasional cup of decaf. In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.

Walker explained that, for most people, the quarter life of caffeine is usually about 12 hours, meaning that 25% of the caffeine in a cup of coffee consumed at noon is still circulating in your brain when you go to bed at midnight. That could well be enough to completely wreck your deep sleep.

I thought of myself as a pretty good sleeper before I met Walker. At lunch he probed me about my sleep habits. I told him I usually get a solid seven hours, fall asleep easily, dream most nights.

How many times a night do you wake up? he asked. Im up three or four times a night (usually to pee), but I almost always fall right back to sleep.

He nodded gravely. Thats really not good, all those interruptions. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity. The interruptions were undermining the amount of deep or slow wave sleep I was getting, something above and beyond the REM sleep I had always thought was the measure of a good nights rest. But it seems that deep sleep is just as important to our health, and the amount we get tends to decline with age.

Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But heres whats uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

The time came to wrap up my experiment in caffeine deprivation. I was eager to see what a body that had been innocent of caffeine for three months would experience when subjected to a couple of shots of espresso. I had thought long and hard about what kind of coffee I would get, and where. I opted for a special, my local coffee shops term for a double-shot espresso made with less steamed milk than a typical cappuccino; its more commonly known as a flat white.

My special was unbelievably good, a ringing reminder of what a poor counterfeit decaf is; here were whole dimensions and depths of flavour that I had completely forgotten about. Everything in my visual field seemed pleasantly italicised, filmic, and I wondered if all these people with their cardboard-sleeve-swaddled cups had any idea what a powerful drug they were sipping. But how could they?

They had long ago become habituated to caffeine, and were now using it for another purpose entirely. Baseline maintenance, that is, plus a welcome little lift. I felt lucky that this more powerful experience was available to me. This along with the stellar sleeps was the wonderful dividend of my investment in abstention.

And yet in a few days time I would be them, caffeine-tolerant and addicted all over again. I wondered: was there any way to preserve the power of this drug? Could I devise a new relationship with caffeine? Maybe treat it more like a psychedelic say, something to be taken only on occasion, and with a greater degree of ceremony and intention. Maybe just drink coffee on Saturdays? Just the one.

When I got home I tackled my to-do list with unaccustomed fervour, harnessing the surge of energy of focus! coursing through me, and put it to good use. I compulsively cleared and decluttered on the computer, in my closet, in the garden and the shed. I raked, I weeded, I put things in order, as if I were possessed. Whatever I focused on, I focused on zealously and single-mindedly.

Around noon, my compulsiveness began to subside, and I felt ready for a change of scene. I had yanked a few plants out of the vegetable garden that were not pulling their weight, and decided to go to the garden centre to buy some replacements. It was during the drive that I realised the true reason I was heading to this particular garden centre: it had this Airstream trailer parked out front that served really good espresso.

This is an edited extract from This Is Your Mind on Plants: Opium-Caffeine-Mescaline by Michael Pollan, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

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The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine? - The Guardian

While considerable ink has been spilled describing how technology generally and applications such as Facebook and Twitter in particular reinforce tribalism, a curious related phenomenon has emerged recently, most clearly seen in social media. While less remarked upon, it is perhaps more revealing of the current state of the American political conversation.

When ideological flame wars erupt online, one can witness how well-informed people of goodwill frequently will set aside critical thinking and readily align with those with whom they share only the loosest of partisan affiliations. Typically, this arises in oppositional contexts, which didnt start (nor have they ended) with Donald TrumpDonald TrumpHouse passes bill to strengthen authority of federal watchdogs Supreme Court leaves CDC eviction moratorium intact How energy will steer the Alaska Senate race MORE.

That said, this dynamic achieved near-ubiquity during the Trump presidency, to wit: I oppose Trump (or President BidenJoe BidenCriminal justice group urges clemency for offenders released to home confinement during pandemic Progressive poll: Majority supports passing Biden agenda through reconciliation Transportation moves to ban airline ticket sales to Belarus amid arrest of opposition journalist MORE, or House Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiOmar says she doesn't regret past comments on Israel House panel votes to create plaque honoring police who served on Jan. 6 House passes bill to remove Confederate statues from Capitol MORE) and policy X, and believe Y, because of Z, and moreover, if you disagree, you are &%$#, and so on. Whatever the merits of the position offered, social media participants increasingly make common cause with strange philosophical bedfellows the center-left happily lying down with anarchists and Marxists, and the center-right embracing ethno-nationalists and populists.

While a demonstration of tribalism activated in and by the virtual commons, it is more than that. How is it that the center-left and center-right sitting far closer to one another along an ideological continuum than either do to extremists to their left and right, respectively fail to note this oddity?

The answer can be found in the Age of Enlightenment, more specifically through consideration of the philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While each mans intellectual progression and range defy caricature, they are often held out as totems of rationalism (in the case of Voltaire) and romanticism (Rousseau). These respective traditions have informed ideological movements, partisan fervor and policy debates ever since.

Until recently, the American political scene of the past 50 years has been an ideological joust between liberals and conservatives, but with each grouping broadly classically liberal in outlook and equally possessed of an empirical, rationalist bent children of Voltaire. Though beliefs about the means best applied to achieve certain ends differed, or even the most desirable ends, a general agreement prevailed as to the meaning of language, understanding of history, and in objective truths that can be deduced from empirical evidence, as did a shared civic culture rooted in accountability, fair play and seeing the other side as opponents and not enemies.

Today, while the traditional notions of left and right still exist, under each of these tribal banners an increasing number of Rousseaunard anti-rationalists have emerged. On the right, this manifests as ethno-nationalism, populism and nativism. On the left, it takes the form of various shades of collectivism and adherence to pseudo-academic fads including critical theory/critical race theory and neo-Marxism. While often cast as fringe or extreme by partisans from the other camp, such ideological flags of convenience are notable less for extremity than for intrinsic anti-rationalism (by contrast, pure libertarianism, while extreme, is firmly planted in rationalism). These frameworks override or reject empirical lived experience and replace them with visceral, emotive mantras or laboratory constructs unsupported by logical deductions drawn from the world as it actually exists.

Tribal impulses cause otherwise Voltairean conservatives or liberals to sympathize with the anti-rational advocates of belief systems, which, in a more considered moment, they might adjudge unfavorably. As a relatively recent phenomenon, it remains to be seen how durable such alignments might prove, and whether the Rousseaunard wings on each end of the spectrum can tug formerly critical-thinking centrists more permanently to their side.

A separate consideration is why anti-rationalist voices are now in the ascendant. Is it that they have always existed and are merely amplified through the leveling, democratizing effects of distributed media, or have they multiplied and expanded their reach in reaction to the challenges and failures of globalism, some other explanation, or a combination of these?

Whatever the reason, good Voltaireans of any ideological stripe ought to stand against all forms of anti-rationalism, however attractively packaged to appeal to ones tribal proclivities. History is replete with examples of romantic, anti-rational projects gone awry; that way lies the gas chamber and the killing fields. For the two reasons I note below, however, the Rousseaunard left would appear to present the greater current existential threat.

First, anti-rationalism only recently has gained or regained political currency on the American political stage. In a cultural and political edifice constructed on a classically liberal, rational foundation, anti-rational movements typically pose as rational to avoid being dismissed as unserious or dangerous. In a media era where a group such as antifa can term anything it opposes as fascist and call itself anti-fascist, despite its own use of fascist tactics, and have this paradox accepted credulously by the commentariat, gaslighting can be a useful tactical tool. Thus, blood and soil nativism is more easily rejected by critical thinkers as antithetical to the founding and American values more generally, and seen for the emotive appeal that it is, while critical theory can masquerade as rationalist, notwithstanding its artificial, Marxian heritage.

Second, and more critically, is the fundamental distinction between the types of anti-rationalism promoted by right Rousseau and left Rousseau movements. Right Rousseau is an expression, typically of some visceral resentment or aspiration. It can do enormous harm if it finds the levers of political power Hitler being only one such example in history but, misdirected dystopian fiction like The Handmaids Tale notwithstanding, it is hard to see how the conditions conducive to its success exist in modern American society (the ascension to the presidency of a bombastic narcissist who implemented conventional center-right policies, while only lightly taking command of the instrumentation of government, is hardly evidence of the descent of the dark night of fascism). Right Rousseau is a spasm, an outburst, consistent only in its incoherence.

Left Rousseau, on the other hand, isnt an expression; its a project or projects. One need only look to the parroting of its maximalist language by mainstream figures of the contemporary left fundamental transformation, Build Back Better, the Great Reset to see the more comprehensive objectives of such projects. These slogans are not tethered to straightforward retrograde desires for things to be like they used to be or to live as we please, but are, rather, a programmatic imperative to reshape systems and human relations more broadly to fit an ideologically-derived construct. Such designs offer no shade or respite. Moreover, anti-rationalist Marxian ideologues are adept at infiltrating the institutions of free societies, using Alinskyite tactics to exploit such societies freedoms and turn institutions against themselves. Whereas Rousseaunards of the right tend to be buffoonish and self-immolate in plain sight, those on the left are more covert and thus of greater danger.

A key to avoiding the further polarization of American society is understanding the threat posed by these children of Rousseau, and seeing past superficial partisan alignment to the real threat such anti-rationalist philosophies and programs pose.

Richard J. Shinder is the founder of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy, and a frequent lecturer, speaker and panelist on business and financial topics. He has written extensively on economic, financial, geopolitical, cultural and corporate governance-related issues.

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The very real threat in the rise of anti-rationalism | TheHill - The Hill

A recent school board meeting in Loudon County, Virginia, turned so heated that attendees faced off in dueling protests and people were hauled off in handcuffs. The main point of disagreement was over the teaching (real or imaginary) of critical race theory (CRT) in public school classrooms, and parents' feelings over that controversial nominally anti-racist but really racially obsessed ideology. The conflict represented an escalation in the ongoing national curriculum wars that, like all such battles, could be peacefully settled by recognizing families' rights to choose educational approaches instead of surrendering children to the whims of government bureaucrats.

"Parents protesting against critical race theory broke into the national anthem when the Loudoun Co., Virginia school board ended public comment because the crowd got too out of hand," Reuters' Gabriella Borter tweeted June 22. "The Loudoun County sheriff's office declared the school board meeting an unlawful assembly. Everyone told to get out or will be trespassing. Two arrests made."

The confrontation in Loudon County is part of a national debate over critical race theory (a subset of overarching critical theory) and related belief systems which, in the guise of deconstructing oppressive and hierarchical human relationships instead strip people of individuality and reduce them to representatives of group identities. This intellectual movement rejects rationalism and objectivity, and brands the West, in general, and the United States, in particular, as irredeemably racistbut its collectivism breeds racism every bit as pernicious as anything cooked up by the Ku Klux Klan.

In response, some states are banning the teaching of CRTan approach that threatens to turn advocates of the ideology into free speech martyrs fighting the entrenched establishment. Trinity College's Isaac Kamola argues that many Americans oppose the ideology "because academic, journalistic and movement efforts to critically interrogate the lasting impact of slavery and American racism fundamentally challenge the free market fundamentalist ideology." That's a wildly tendentious claim, but ideological bans lend it a gloss of credibility.

Bans also run afoul of the difficulty inherent in trying to filter ideas which can be taught without use of a red-flag brand name, or by teachers who unknowingly absorb assumptions which permeate academia and then pass them on to students without reference to specific scholarly sources. Removing ideas from their origins makes it easier to pretend the ideology has little presence in classrooms.

"No, 6-year-olds are not being taught Derrick Bell or forced to read Judith Butler, or God help them, Kimberl Crenshaw," observes writer Andrew Sullivan. "Of course they aren't and I don't know anyone who says they are. But they are being taught popularized terms, new words, and a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory."

Sullivan compares the role of CRT in many schools' curricula to lessons in Catholic school, which don't dwell on theological intricacies but do pass along the religion's values. Also, he points out, CRT rejects the foundations of the liberal order in free and open societies. That ups the ante on the decades-long national battles over what is taught in public school classrooms.

"Rather than build bridges, public schooling often forces people into wrenching, zerosum conflict," notes the Cato Institute's Public Schooling Battle Map, which tracked such debates long before the current controversy. "Think creationism versus evolution, or assigned readings containing racial slurs. The conflicts are often intensely personal, and guarantee if one fundamental value wins, another loses."

That said, families that choose how their children learnmy own includedrather than defaulting to government-run institutions don't have to lose anything because we have largely escaped these battles. By homeschooling, or micro-schooling, or picking private or charter schools, we can avoid curricula permeated with ideas we find toxic and select those that present ideas of which we approve or, even better from my perspective, that encourage open debate among opposing perspectives.

"The kids break into two groups at lunch," my son tells me of his private high school. "The smaller group is really woke and always angry about something. I sit with the larger group of normal kids."

My wife and I aren't worried that the school will suddenly turn into a CRT seminary. We like and trust the administrators and teachers, but we also pay tuition. If the school abandons its open embrace of discussion and debate, we'll stop those payments and educate our son elsewhere.

That's not to say that we're emulating conservative lawmakers by trying to shield our kid from ideas we dislike. Our son is going to encounter them one way or another, so we prepare him to engage with CRT's advocates. This summer, alongside time devoted to fun activities, he's reading Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, as well as materials that support enlightenment values, individualism, and open debate. You don't fight bad ideas by ignoring them; you have to understand them and their flaws.

Parents that reject liberalism and support CRT also have alternatives to battling over the content of schoolroom lessons. They can introduce their tykes to Ibram X. Kendi's Antiracist Baby Picture Book, marinate their kids in CRT-infused homeschooling, or send them to one of many private schools that offer willing families an education steeped in the ideology. That sounds like a tour through hell, to me, but if that's what they want their kids to learn, let them do so in peace, and without zero-sum arguments about what children are taught in shared institutions.

Then our kids can engage with each other's ideas in a society of diverse viewpoints.

The curriculum wars were nasty enough when they were over competing editions of textbooks spun for conservative school boards in Texas and liberal educators in California, or about whether to call the United States a "democracy" or a "republic." Now that the debate is escalating over more fundamental differences involving the value of liberal ideas, individualism, and rationality, it's difficult to see how Americans of opposing viewpoints can share tax-funded schools that fall on one side or the other of the ideological divide. So let's not even try when we can encourage the growing exodus from public schools to alternatives of all sorts.

We don't need to wage the curriculum wars at all. Instead, let's pick where and how our children are educated, and encourage others to do the same. Then they can hash out their ideas in a society that remains open to disagreement and debate.

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The Critical Race Theory Debate Wouldn't Matter if We Had More School Choice - Reason

Claims such as science says we must lock down, follow the evidence and similar assertions have been thrown around as if they are a given. Yet, as the philosopher and polymath David Hume pointed out, there is a world of difference between statements about what is, and statements about whatought to be. Hume argued the point that how we move from the descriptive to the prescriptive is not all that clear, a quandary that has become known as Hume's guillotine.

Science, used to determine what exists concretely, does not make normative claims about that which ought to be.We have certain non-negotiable rights enshrined in the constitution for a reason. Good ends do not necessarily justify any and all means to achieve said ends. Paying attention to scientific evidence is crucial, but so too is not over-simplifying the crucial debates around ethics in public policy.

Science, while nearly invaluable in informing public policy, is not the sole determinant of what is ethical and what is not. One is guilty of the fallacy of begging the question when one presupposes consequentialist ethics, most notably utilitarianism, as the guiding framework, as the very question is around what is ethical and how we determine it.

Ethics is much more complex than X is, therefore Y ought to be. So are the numerous other debates in philosophy that are relevant here, such as the problem of induction in the philosophy of science, the metaphysical question of what evidence even is, and the epistemic question of whether empiricism, rationalism or both are appropriate to determine it.

None of this is denying science or ignoring evidence. Instead, it is acknowledging the complexities of our world, and that the empirical sciences are not a panacea to these issues indeed, what is more scientific than the process of asking uncomfortable questions?

If anything, the current pandemic has shown the need for scientists to embrace the right philosophical framework to inform their own approaches to the problems we face.

Jacques Jonker

Cape Town

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an e-mail with your comments. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Send your letter by e-mail to letters@businesslive.co.za. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.

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LETTER: We must not over-simplify the crucial debates around ethics in public policy - Business Day