Peripatetic Philosopher announces WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?:

BOOK’S DESCRIPTION

WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE, 2^nd Edition.  Whether of our own making or not, we all reside in some kind of cage.  There is an exit ramp but few acknowledge much less take it.  It can be the cage of a bad relationship that we endure as if there is no other option; a mountain of biases that confines us within its walls, refusing to see how they are self-imprisoning; a job we hate in which we feel trapped by its demands; the cage of debt that wreaks  havoc with our lives for our lack of prudence; the cage of ill health brought on by eating, drinking, or smoking too much while avoiding exercise; the cage of never being able to say “no” to our children or friends when that would be best for everyone; the failure to cut ties with people who distract us from our purpose; the cage of celebrity worship that makes strangers more real than family and friends; the assuming of a lifestyle we cannot afford that finds us always anxious and tense.  These are cages with which we are all familiar.  Social psychologist James R. Fisher, Jr. penetrates these cages and provides a strategy for acknowledging the cage, then showing how to extricate ourselves from that confinement.   The 2^nd edition has been revised, updated, edited and enhanced with illustrations, photographs, graphics, schematics, tables and graphs for the reader’s pleasure.

A “Look Inside” on amazon introduces the reader to the book with several chapters to peruse.   

$9.99 on www.amazon.com, Kindle Library

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects on VALUE of DIALOGUE in these SHADOWY TIMES:

The Value of Dialogue in these Shadowy Times

 JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2018 (Memorial Day in the USA)

It pleases me that REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY has generated so much interest.  People have been responding from many perspective, one mentioning that Yuval Noah Harari in SAPIENS (2015) is writing from his cage.  Of course, he is! We all are!  It is why I have written a book on the subject (soon to be released in a 2^nd edition).  That should not, however, discourage us from letting a little light into the cage. 

The young Israeli historian, who was born in 1976, presents the evidence uncovered by scores of paleontologists and archeologists over the centuries regarding the nature of homo sapien, which is Latin for “wise man.”  

There is little doubt that over the past 2.5 million years, just as other animals have evolved, so has man including several homo species variations before homo sapiens came to dominate.  Harari writes:

Our closest living relatives include the chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans.  The chimpanzees are closest.  Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters.  One became the ancestor of the chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Now, many reading this (which appears on page 5 of SAPIENS) may read no further.  That would be unfortunate.  Homo species of various Latin names, including the familiar Neanderthals, were distributed across the earth.   

Neanderthals settled in the cold climate of Europe whereas our homo sapien species originated from East and Southern Africa.  Harari has a picture in his book of a blond Neanderthal girl 400,000 years ago. 

In that same time frame, homo sapiens developed weapons to hunt big game, whereas most homo species up to that point were scavengers along with hyenas and jackals, and ate plants, berries and insects, and killed small prey. 

The nature of the food supply determined many things including the individual size of the homo species and their muscular construction as well as the size of their brains.  For example, Neanderthals were quite large and muscular with a brain even larger than homo sapiens, but homo sapiens developed language which strengthened the integrity of their primitive community, and allowed them to exchange thoughts, ideas and strategies.  The stimulus for language was gossip, which is what our shadowy society still rides on today. 

Long before Charles Darwin was on the scene homo species were adapting to circumstances.  Harari writes:

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, lived homo soloensis who were suited to life in the tropics   . . . On the small island Flores . . . Humans reached Flores when the sea level was exceptionally low, and the island was easily accessible from the mainland.  When the sea rose again, some people were trapped on the island, which was poor in resources.  Big people, who need a lot of food, died first.  Small fellows survived much better.  Over the generations the people of Flores became dwarfs . . . (They) reached a maximum height of 3.5 feet and weighed no more than fifty-five pounds.  They were nevertheless able to produce stone tools, and even managed occasionally to hunt down some of the island’s elephants – though, to be fair, the elephants were a dwarf species as well.

Once the Cognitive Revolution was well underway some 100,000 years ago, gossip which was mainly about wrong doing, moved into rumor mongering, which in turn gave birth to the press and the 4^th estate, which dominates society today. 

Once the imagination -- homo sapiens demonstrated this quite early -- the insides of these primitive human beings connected with the outside world in imaginative ways.  An ivory figurine was uncovered in a dig of a “lion-man” (pictured in the book) from Stadel Cave in Germany and said to have been created 32,000 years ago.  What makes this fascinating is that the Peugeot Lion on the hood of its automobile appears identical to this earlier “lion-man.” 

TRYING TO MAKE ALL THIS FIT WITH WHAT IS ALREADY THERE

REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY was posted somewhat in exasperation.  Sometimes I think we are trapped so deep into our cages that our curiosity, focus and attention is like those ancient ancestors of Java, dwarfed for lack of mental nourishment. 

All history is recent, being no more than 2,000 to 3,000 years old.  In that period, three major religions and cultures sprang out of our imagination: Judaism, Islamism and Christianity. 

For most of my adult life, but mainly in the last thirty years, I have read extensively on all these great religions, and have had an opportunity to visit many of the sites that once their interpreters traveled. 

My life over the last eight decades has seen too many wars without causes, too many attacks on our roots without a rational foundation, and too frequently a retreat into NOWHERE LAND without forethought or reasonable justification. 

As Sir William points out, historian Yuval Noah Harari does not escape of the tag of the cage because in his two books – the second of which I have not yet started – he claims that we will not be the same homo sapiens tomorrow that we are today, suggesting a radical transformation into another species.  It may sell his books, but I don’t think so.

We differ in some ways to poet Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), but not radically.

Klaus has a problem with Dante and his “Divine Comedy” as well as Dante’s belief system and history.  Yet, Dante essentially invented the Italian language in writing this book.  His Italian was less cumbersome than the Latin, and it lent itself well to a vernacular audience.    

Dante also designed for contemporary society a place called “Purgatory” (or Limbo) that had never been quite brought into fictive focus.  His “Paradise” (Heaven) and “Inferno” (Hell) were peopled with his contemporaries as he scaled the cliffs of that comedy with Virgil, Beatrice, a girl he had loved since he was nine, and St. Barnard. 

Dante’s work was one of the imagination which was not truly appreciated until hundreds of years after its creation.  It spoke then as now to the vagaries of people of every generation. 

Were he not to have been banned from Florence, the city he loved, “The Divine Comedy” likely would never have been composed.  Likewise, had Machiavelli not been ostracized by the Medici’s from Rome, “The Prince” may never have been written, which was a guide to draconian power and authority whereas Dante’s effort was a treatise on the draconian architecture of papal authority, and in the process, loosening the church's hold over the Italian people. 

Dante’s life was on the bubble of the thousand years after Emperor Constantine had decriminalized Christianity in 313 with the Christian faith made the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380.  The year was 1300 when “The Divine Comedy” was published.   

Dante had a problem with the papacy and Roman Catholicism but believed deeply in his Christian God and of Jesus Christ as his savior.  He was alive when the papacy suffered the “Babylonian Captivity” with the papacy moving to Avignon, France with French popes to rule the Catholic Church there for 78 years. 

Machiavelli bridged the 15^th and 16^th century when the Renaissance was in full swing and Roman Catholicism had shifted its emphasis to the humanities which differed with the Christianity that Dante had experienced. 

The Renaissance flourished between the 14^th and 16^th centuries.  Westerners still take pride in its obvious accomplishments.  But the “Golden Age of Islam,” which flourished from the 8^th to the 14^th centuries, supplied much of the intellectual energy of the Renaissance. 

Islam first rescued “The Golden Age of Greece” that had flourished from 300 to 500 BC.  Without this effort, it is doubtful The Renaissance could have built on the works of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. 

Once Rome was sacked in 410, the “Dark Middle Ages” followed until 800 when Emperor Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire came to power. 

Moreover, during the “Golden Age of Islam,” people of that faith not only invented the alphabet and numbers, making reading, comprehension and calculations more facile, but were pioneers in engineering, art, architecture, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and many other disciplines, as well as retrieving Ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, drama and science by translating the Greek into Arabic and then into Latin.  A volume of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND is devoted to this subject (see Kindle). 

What the West is most familiar with is the Jewish Old Testament, and the Christian New Testament.  Like early man was engaged in rumors, and rumors became myths, and myths became beliefs, and beliefs became religions, and religions became Faiths and a gauge to coping, we treat the “Cognitive Revolution” as if it happened only a few generations ago when it is at least a hundred thousands years old. 

We are just in the current iteration of this revolution and just as gullible as our earlier ancestors were with a lot less information. 

It makes little sense for the hubris of the West against the scorn and mistrust of the Middle East in view of our common history.

WHY FAITH, WHY BELIEF, WHY THE OBSESSIVE RETREAT FROM SELF-KNOWING

In the end as in the beginning, man has always been interested in self-preservation.  I say “always” but I’m no longer quite sure.  The Non Sequitur Comic script by Wiley Miller has a person walking off a cliff with his eyes down on his smart phone.  That captures somewhat the essence of our times, that is, being purposelessly oblivious and self-preoccupied.

Now, we have all these new disciplines in neurophysics, neuropsychology and all these other neuroanatomy studies of the mind and its relationship to the intricate circuitry of the brain.  Yet, the irony is that the desultory style of our lives makes one wonder what impact if any these studies and disciplines have in the end.

In all these studies, it is unlikely they will discover the soul although the mind, according to Harari consumes 25 percent of all our energy and is the main factory of the soul. 

Alas, the brain is a very busy place, but some of its circuits are well overused and others appreciably neglected.

This is apparent when it comes to God and Science, material and spiritual pursuits, and yes, faith and beliefs. 

Ken writes eloquently about his faith because it has been there for him in his most trying moments, and has never deserted him no matter how much his reliance on its constant presence.

You can point out the myths that support belief systems, challenge the ideology of their construction, but that does not lessen their spiritual tenacity for the believer.  To believe is to nourish the soul with the energy of a mind that is employed with purpose rather than preoccupied with validation. 

Validation is a hopeless quest because it is other centered when love, which is the foundation of any belief system, is predicated on the belief that we are more than amoeba marking time until we perish.  Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the Double Helix of DNA, attempted to discover the soul, an admitted nonbeliever, and came up with nothing.  He failed because his search was pointless scientist that he was.

Like Ken, I believe in God and am a renegade Irish Roman Catholic.  Again like he is, it was the discipline, the Christian philosophy and ethics of my faith that has guided my life these many decades.  My Catholicism provided me with structure where sincerity, self-awareness and self-acceptance could find a toe hold in my frail spirit, and keep me upright to tool along. 

Proselytizing is not in my nature; nor is rallying others to follow my crusade as it doesn’t exist.  My total effort in writing, and admittedly I’ve not been all that successful, is to introduce others to themselves as belief in God has introduced me to myself.

The Peripatetic Philosopher REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY:

REFLECTIONS OF A THURSDAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 24, 2018

The chaos and consolations of the past still haunt us in the 21th century with the relationship between religious faith and public discourse differing with what it was even a generation ago. 

With the “war on terror,” religion no longer is confined to history books, whatever millennials or others think, but on the front page of our minds. 

Christian churches are in a state of ferment about sex, creationism, culture and the struggle between fundamentalism and liberalism, which is not new but no longer civil or just.   

We live in a time of fragmentation.  The Western world no longer aspires as it did in Martin Luther’s time to be a place of faith, much less belief in God.  Nor is there a drive to find and preserve a common culture; in fact, the idea is repellent.

The world of popular culture has become a cage which jangles and sings off key in the background of our controlled lives with TV soap operas, pop music and 24/7 media bombast in an all-but-lost world of shared values.  

There is no place in this world for courtly love as it has been superseded by a quest for social justice, a noble objective on the surface.  But what if a Just Society had a place as well for the Ideal of Love and a Quest for God once found in the imagination? 

For a century now we have been moving away from love and God and what do we have for it, but permissiveness, promiscuity, corruption, chicanery, war and nihilism?

Regardless of your religious belief, what if the links of our times could stretch unbroken with the origins of our Western culture where there once was room for such preferences? 

Alas, being reared Irish Roman Catholic, I can recall in my maturing years the Papacy’s silence in the Holocaust, the slowness of the church’s admission of the scandal of priests’ abusing children in their care, and the church’s still stubborn policy on birth control in an already overcrowded planet.

Great cathedrals still pencil the landscape of Europe but there is a cultural collapse when it comes to love, God and a tolerance of peoples of differing than Western persuasion. 

What happens to the culture of a civilization when it no longer relates to what is going on inside the heads of individual men, women and children; when there is constant subliminal agitation to think, feel and behave in a certain way; when ubiquitous conformity has little room for variance with its draconian norms; when people are so much on automatic pilot that they don’t recognize the absurdity of their lives?

It is a sign of the debasement and confusion of our times that pop music (e.g. Bob Dylan, 2016 Nobel Laureate for Literature) speaks to the many far more poignantly than academics, politicians, corporate leaders, and philosophers.

Our democratic republic offers us an opportunity to place a vote in a spirit of positive optimism for our candidates of choice, but what this process has devolved to is merely a chance to vote against the other party’s candidates whom we choose to hate because we are programmed by media to do so. 

Mainstream Christian churches have become detached from the inner lives and inner concerns of ordinary mortals as have the two dominant political parties.  On the one hand, there is an abject disillusionment with societal institutions; and on the other, the Church with its mission to provide safe haven for troubled souls has turned out to be corrupt and dysfunctional and no haven at all. 

The quest for a Good Place and a Good Church detached from everyday life is not the unknown secret of the universe but evidence that we have lost our moral compass and our way. 

This is the central dilemma of our times.  We once assumed we shared the same language and the same inner life.  That is no longer the case.  We instead share the detritus of a world lost in its own confusion.  

In checking Facebook, YouTube or surfing the Internet, we realize we no longer share a common culture but rather a common emptiness with millions if not billions of other souls.  Human beings have never been as alone as they are today while they are constantly reassured that they are connected.  But are they?  And if so, what do they hold in common with anyone? 

Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818 – 1898) claims we are all conscious of our own secret life.  But with the concatenations of dissonant noise, how can we tell?

Obviously, there is conflict today between nascent spiritualism and transparent materialism, but there should be room for both as complements rather than contradiction to everyday life. 

Whether you are in the process of losing your Faith, whatever that may be; or are returning to a new version of your Faith; or whether you are utterly disillusioned with politics and politicians; or are hopeful of political solutions to the injustices in your community or about the world; or whether your deepest experience of love with a sense of belonging happened a long time ago when you were a child, and has never been successfully rekindled since, you can abort this common cage if you have but the will to recognize you have such a capacity. 

The first step is to find the patience to have a long silent conversation with yourself, the person you carry about whenever you go.  Then trust yourself in this exercise and that world you once knew in your innocence will reopen with such wonder that it will appear as if it has always been right outside your window.

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

Genius & Contemporary Society

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 11, 2018

William L. Livingston is a professional engineer with over 100 patents, and with a career devoted to building nuclear power plants as far away as South Korea. For the past thirty years or so, he has devoted himself to studying how to transform dysfunctional organizations, existing in dystopias into productive, effective, happy Utopias. Since he is working at the bleeding edge of systems-think, making significant breakthroughs, he is functioning on a plane remote from most of us, but significant to all of us.

Nearly thirty years ago, he attended a book fair in New York City, and wrote me a note, “Send me your book and I’ll send you one of mine.” My book just published at the time was Work Without Managers. I sent him a copy of that book, and received promptly a copy of his Have Fun at Work. He autographed his copy with this note: “To Jim: Off to the races on the great crusade to organizational sanity” (July 28, 1991).

The book was an amazement. I have read and reread it several times, and most recently as late as last night. I have given similar attention to The New Plague, Friends in High Places, and Design for Prevention.

He has most recently published on Kindle his four volume Pilgrimage to Utopia and his four volume Magnificent Metamorphosis.
I have read captions of both these works sent to me periodically from him, but not the finished products, as I’m trying to get all my works on Kindle as my publisher has gone defunct, and so they are not available. Once I complete that task, I plan to bask in his genius as genius he is.

Authors are often very proprietary about their works, but William L. Livingston is generous to a fault, as he cares not a whit about anyone lifting his ideas and using them as his or her own. Besides being the most brilliant person I’ve ever known as we have remained friends throughout the last three decades, he is the most selfless. He doesn’t get in the way of his ideas.

What precipitated these reflections was coming across English novelist and short story writer E. M. Forster’s (1879 – 1970) “The Machine Stops.” It is a dystopian story of humanity being relegated to living underground relying on a giant machine to provide the method of their survival. It was written in 1909 or 109 years ago but has distressing relevance to our own time.

No person I know is reflecting and writing more poignantly about our current insanities than he is. I told my Beautiful Betty, “Maybe society will have to wait a hundred years to appreciate Bill Livingston.” She smiled, “And maybe that is true of you as well.”

JRF