The Saunterer

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong on how to stay in the business of life into old age

    Louis Armstrong:   

As long as a person breathes, they still have a chance to exercise the talents they were born with. I speak of something which I know about and have been doing all of my life, and that’s Music. And now that I am an elderly man I still feel the same about music and its creations. And at the age of “sixty-nine” I really don’t feel that I am on my way out at all. Of course a person may do a little less - but the foundation will always be there. . . . There’s no such thing as on the way out. As long as you are still doing something interesting and good. You are in business as long as you are breathing. “Yeah.” (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 267.)
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    For a brief biography of Louis Armstrong, click here.

Roger S. Gottlieb on what religion can offer the environmental cause

    In an interview, Roger S. Gottlieb said this:

Religion has a certain kind of legitimacy among many people and in many parts of the world that secular life simply doesn’t have. . . . In Madagascar, where the fishermen were dynamiting to get fish and destroying the coral reef and fish stock, when the government said, “Don’t do it,” they kept doing it, and when ecologists said, “Don’t do it,’ they kept doing it. But when the local sheik, the religious leader, said this was against the Koran, they stopped.

    Roger S. Gottlieb is a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The interview appeared in the June 23, 2006, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, page A14. The occasion was Gottlieb’s new book, A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future (Oxford University Press).
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    For Roger S. Gottlieb’s home page, click here.

Vera Brittain on seeking the best which is in all that is

    A young Vera Brittain dedicated her life to seeking the best which is in all that is. Hear her:

He said bitterly that I wanted to be famous & make a name for myself, but I should be none the better for it if I did etc. etc. I gently but firmly insisted again that I had no care for the material glory even of fame. . . . I wonder if he could ever understand that my search, that my object, for which I enter upon taking exams. & university life, is the Beautiful & the True in every atom of created life . . . & that I learn & learn because I desire to have knowledge, believing that the more complete the knowledge, the nearer is one to Truth, my high ideal & final goal, as yet unseen but sometimes shining luminously through clouds. I wonder if he could understand how it is that I, leaning out & gazing at an earthly scene with a fierce yearning & aspiration which no friends or parents could either give or take away, feel something stir in my soul which is one with the glory, the diversity, of the world’s Creator, and one with the best which is in all that is. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 280.)
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    For a brief biography of Vera Brittain, click here.

C. S. Lewis’s argument against vivisection

    C. S. Lewis’s argument against vivisection is this:

Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reason.

    Compare, if you’d like, C. S. Lewis’s argument against vivisection with that in a post on this weblog made on 5/31/06 and titled “John Cowper Powys’ unanswerable argument against vivisection.”
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    For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here.

Guy de Maupassant on the mission of fiction writers

    To Guy de Maupassant, the mission of fiction writers is the following:

Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, of taste, differing from one person to another, create as many truths as there are men upon earth. And our minds, taking instructions from these organs, so diversely impressed, understand, analyze, judge, as if each of us belonged to a different race. Each one of us, therefore, forms for himself an illusion of the world; and the writer (the painter, too) has no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion, with all the contrivances of art that he has learned and has at his command. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 247.)
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    For a brief biography of Guy de Maupassant, click here.

Leo Stein on the necessity of recognizing one’s false positions

    Leo Stein tells us why it is necessary to recognize one’s false positions:

It is commonplace that one must recognize one’s faults in order to correct them, but one must be prepared to recognize one’s false positions in order to evolve beyond them.
(Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 198.)

    This is a life-changing insight if people could act on it. Few dare to think they hold false positions. So they aren’t prepared to go to war to defeat their false positions, which they have to do if ever they are to evolve beyond them. 
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    For a brief biography of Leo Stein, click here.

Bertrand Russell on how work gives self-respect

    To Bertrand Russell, work gives self-respect:

Work, when it goes well, is in itself a great delight; and after any considerable achievement I look back at it with the sort of placid satisfaction one has after climbing a mountain. What is absolutely vital to me is the self-respect I get from work – when (as often) I have done something for which I feel remorse, work restores me to a belief that it is better I should exist than not exist. And another thing I greatly value is the kind of communion with past and future discoverers. I often have imaginary conversations with Leibniz, in which I tell him how fruitful his ideas have proved, and how much more beautiful the result is than he could have foreseen; and in moments of self-confidence, I imagine students hereafter having similar thoughts about me. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 287.)
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    For a brief biography of Bertrand Russell, click here.

J. R. Ackerley on the need for reducing the human population

    J. R. Ackerley wanted the human population to be reduced by three-quarters or so: 

I have no animus against the human race, I simply want it painlessly but drastically reduced, for I don’t believe it will ever reduce itself. I don’t want nuclear war, it would destroy the animals and our treasures, which I wish to preserve. I want a beautiful plague, a human scourge, which would take off in a jiffy three-quarters at least of the entire population. . . . I can see no other solution to a doubled population . . . and the animals all gone. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 312.)

    At the time J. R. Ackerley wrote the above, the human population was about half of that of today. People have become a commodity. We would value individuals far more were there far fewer people. A world with just a few thousand remaining great apes and tigers and polar bears, largely because of runaway human breeding, is a world deprived of much joyous reason for wanting to live. Religion’s great part in this is why The Saunterer refuses to belong to a religion.
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    Zero Population Growth (ZPG) changed its name several years ago to Population Connection. According to it, the world population is 6,529,295,049 and the US population is 299,135,749. The Population Connection and EcoFuture contain news and discussions on the suppressed quality of living that comes from overpopulation.
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    For a literary account of having a dog as a friend, J. R. Ackerley’s book, My Dog Tulip, is uncommonly good.
    For a brief biography of J. R. Ackerley, click here.

Claude Debussy on what wilderness is for

    To Claude Debussy, to experience wilderness was to find oneself in prayer:

Before the passing sky, in long hours of contemplation of its magnificent and ever-changing beauty, I am seized by an incomparable emotion. The whole expanse of nature is reflected in my own sincere but feeble soul. Around me the branches of the trees reach out toward the firmament, here are the sweet-scented flowers smiling in the meadow, here the soft earth is carpeted with sweet herbs. . . . Nature invites its ephemeral and trembling travelers to experience these wonderful and disturbing spectacles - that is what I call prayer. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 240.)

    Obviously he is speaking of experiencing wilderness in solitude, for to experience it with people around does not serve prayer.
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    For a brief biography of Claude Debussy, click here.

Arne Naess’s eight principles of deep ecology

    In a 1984 brainstorming session while camping in Death Valley, Arne Naess and George Sessions came up with eight principles of deep ecology. Dale Jamieson, writing in the April 28, 2006, issue of The Times Literary Supplement, puts the eight principles this way:

   The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life have value in themselves;
    Richness and diversity of life-forms are values in themselves;
    Human beings have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs;
    The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population, and the flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease;
    Human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening;
    Basic economic, technological and ideological structures must be changed, and the resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from that at present;
    The ideological change that is needed is mainly that of appreciating the quality of life rather than pursuing an increasingly higher standard of living;
    Those who subscribe to these points have an obligation to try to implement the necessary changes.

    Helping to clarify the eight principles is the explanation of deep ecology in the current edition of Wikipedia:   

Deep ecology is a recent philosophy or ecosophy based on a shift away from the anthropocentric bias of established environmental and green movements. The philosophy is marked by a new interpretation of "self" which de-emphasizes the rationalistic duality between the human organism and its environment, thus allowing emphasis to be placed on the intrinsic value of other species, systems and processes in nature. This position leads to an ecocentric system of environmental ethics. Deep ecology describes itself as "deep" because it is concerned with fundamental philosophical questions about the role of human life as one part of the ecosphere, in distinction to ecology as a branch of biological science, and to merely utilitarian environmentalism based on the well-being of humans alone.

    Jamieson says that in Naess’s view the eight principles of deep ecology “serve as a platform for environmental thought and action that can bring together people from entirely diverse religious and philosophical traditions.”
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    Questions: Can non-human things have value apart from there being humans to value them? If all people where removed from the universe, would the universe with its great remaining ecology have value? Might it even have increased value?
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    For a brief biography of Arne Naess, click here.
    For Dale Jamieson’s home page, click here.