Category: Philosophy

About the English language

There’s more to this topic than meets the eye.

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that America and Britain are “two countries separated by the same language.”

A long time ago that became a quotable quote. Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and died in England in 1950. He was 94.

Although I have visited the USA many times before, I came to live here in Merlin, Oregon, with Jeannie, my gorgeous wife, in 2012. And we love living here.

However, I still think like an Englishman and spell my words in English English.

Read the following. I am sure you will enjoy it.

ooOOoo

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving. LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images

Valerie M. Fridland, University of Nevada, Reno

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

In fact, evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

Valerie M. Fridland, Professor of Linguistics, University of Nevada, Reno

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

Thank you, Valerie Fridland, for your interest article.

To quote another famous idiom, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Artemis images

A unique record taken by the crew.

Human-created photos of this historic mission cannot be replace by articificial intelligence (AI).

This is the reason I am republishing an article from The Conversation.

ooOOoo

Artemis II crew brought a human eye and storytelling vision to the photos they took on their mission

Astronaut Jeremy Hansen takes a picture through the camera shroud covering a window on the Orion spacecraft. NASA

Christye Sisson, Rochester Institute of Technology

In early April 2026, the Artemis II mission captivated me and millions of people watching from across the world. The crew’s courage, skill and infectious wonder served as tangible proof of human persistence and technological achievement, all against the mysterious backdrop of space.

People back on Earth got to witness the mission through remarkable photos of space captured by astronauts. Images created and shared by astronauts underscore how photography builds a powerful, authentic connection that goes beyond what technology alone can capture.

As a photographer and the director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, I am especially drawn to how these photographs have been at the center of the public’s collective experience of this mission.

In an era when image authenticity is often questioned and with the capabilities of autonomous, AI-driven imaging, NASA’s choice to train astronauts in photography has placed meaning over convenience and prioritized their human perspectives and creativity.

Capturing space from the crew’s perspective

Photography was not originally placed as a high priority in NASA’s Apollo era. The astronauts only took photographs if they had the chance and all their other tasks were complete.

An image of the entire Earth from space.
‘The Blue Marble’ view of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. NASA

Thanks largely in part to public response to those images from Apollo, including “Earthrise” and the “Blue Marble” being widely credited for helping catalyze the modern environmental movement, NASA shifted its approach to utilize photography to help capture the public’s imagination by training their astronauts in photographic practices.

The Artemis II mission’s photographs have helped cut through the increasing volume of artificially generated images circulating on social media. NASA’s social media releases of the crew’s photographs have garnered thousands of shares and comments.

This excitement could be explained by the novelty of photos from space, but these images also distinguish themselves as products of astronauts experiencing these sights and interpreting them through their photographs. These differences require an important distinction around where technology ends and humanity begins.

An astronaut looking out the window of the Orion spacecraft, where the full moon is visible in space.
NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman watches the Moon from one of the Orion spacecraft’s windows. NASA

Human perspective versus AI tools

Photography has long integrated AI-powered software and data-driven tools in a variety of ways: to process raw images, fill in missing color information, drive precise focus and guide image editing, among others. These modern technological assists help human photographers realize their vision.

Artificial intelligence is also increasingly capable of operating machinery competently and autonomously, from cars to drones and cameras.

And AI can generate convincing, realistic images and videos from nothing more than a text prompt, using readily available tools.

Researchers train AI to mimic patterns informed by millions of sample images, and the algorithm can then either take or create a photograph based on what it predicts would be the most likely version of a successful, believable image.

Human-created photos are rooted in direct observation, intent and lived experience, while AI images – or choices made by AI-driven tools – are not. While both can produce compelling and believable visuals, the human photographs carry emotional power because the photographer is drawing from their experiences and perspective in that moment to tell an authentic story.

Artemis II photographs resonate, not only because they are historic, but because they reflect the deliberate choices and intent of a human being in that specific moment and context. The exposure, camera setting, lens choice and composition are all dictated by the astronaut’s vision, skill, perspective and experience. Each image is unique in comparison with the others. These choices give the images narrative power, anchoring them in human perspective.

The Earth shown partially shadowed beyond the Moon in space
NASA’s ‘Earthset’ photo captured by the Artemis II crew. NASA

Images to tell a story

Photographers choose what to include in the final version of their image to tell a story. In the Artemis II images, this human perspective comes out. In the “Earthset” photo, you see a striking juxtaposition of the Moon’s monochromatic, textured surface in the foreground against a slivered, bright Earth.

The choice to include both in the frame contrasts these objects literally and figuratively, inviting comparison. It creates a narrative where Earth is contrasted against the Moon – life is contrasted against the absence of it.

Another photo shows the nightside of the whole Earth, featuring the Sun’s halo, auroras and city lights. The choice to include the subtle framing of the window of the capsule in the lower left corner reminds the viewer where and how this image was captured: by a human, inside a capsule, hurtling through space. That detail grounds the photograph in the human perspective.

Both photos are reminiscent of Earthrise and the Blue Marble. These past images hold a place in the global collective consciousness, shaped by a shared historical moment.

The Artemis II photographs are anchored in this collective moment of lived human experience, yet also shaped by each astronaut’s viewpoint. The crew’s unique perspectives exemplify photography’s transformative power by inviting viewers to engage emotionally and intellectually with their journey. These photographs share the astronauts’ awe and wonder and affirm the value of human creativity and its ability to connect us in a captured moment.

Christye Sisson, Professor of Photographic Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

I am going to repeat a sentence towards the end of the article: “These past images hold a place in the global collective consciousness, shaped by a shared historical moment.”

That global collective consciousness!

Consciousness, and the Human Brain

An astounding video by David Eagleman.

Amazingly, Jean and I were being run recently in to somewhere local and Trevor, our driver, was listening to a talk by David Eagleman. I was captivated.

In that talk David Eagleman spoke about Roger Penrose and his research into consciousness. Here’s an AI summary:

Roger Penrose proposes that human consciousness is non-computational and originates from quantum processes within brain neurons, rather than just neural connections. Together with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, he developed the “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (Orch OR) theory, which suggests consciousness arises from quantum computations in microtubules. 

Roger Penrose is the author of The Emperers New Mind.

Thus, beyond the eighty-six billion neurons that make up the brain, there are also the microtubals. These are very small and the diameter of several thousand of them are less than the diameter of the human hair. See WikiPedia.

“The brain has deep purpose” was one of the sayings Eagleman spoke of. “Why do we have experience” was another.

There was much more that I did not really understand. But it was still fascinating.

Then we discovered that what Trevor was listening to was also a video. The video is Inner Cosmos. It runs for 75 wonderful minutes.

Here is that video.

To say that this has absolutely updated my mind to a newer level is an understatement; big time!

Please watch the video.

The Ten Commitments

This is important (and brilliant).

Jean and I were taken to our regular humanist meeting last Saturday morning. The topic was Christian Nationalism.

Today, I want to explain what these commitments are. Then on Sunday I will post some images.

ooOOoo

Ten Commitments

Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools

Altruism

Altruism is the unselfish concern for the welfare of others without expectation of reward, recognition, or return. Opportunities for acts of altruism are everywhere in the family, the classroom, the school, and the wider community. Think of examples of altruistic acts in your experience. What person-to-person and group projects, classroom and school-wide activities, and community service projects might you and your students undertake?

Caring for the World Around Us

Everyone can and ought to play a role in caring for the Earth and its inhabitants. We can directly experience the living things in our homes and neighborhoods like trees, flowers, birds, insects, and pets. Gradually we expand our neighborhood. We learn about deserts and oceans, rivers and forests, the wildlife around us and the wildlife elsewhere. We learn that we are dependent on each other, on the natural world, and all that lives in it for food and shelter, space and beauty.

Critical Thinking

We gain reliable knowledge because we are able to observe, report, experiment, and analyze what goes on around us. We also learn to raise questions that are clear and precise, to gather information, and to reason about the information we receive in a way that tests it for truthfulness, accuracy, and utility. From our earliest years we learn how to think and to share and challenge our ideas and the ideas of others, and consider their consequences. Practice asking “what next?” and “why?” and “how do I/you/we know that?”

Empathy

We human beings are capable of empathy, the ability to understand and enter imaginatively into another living being’s feelings, the sad ones and the happy ones as well. Many of the personal relationships we have (in the family, among friends, between diverse individuals, and amid other living things) are made positive through empathy. With discussion and role-playing, we can learn how other people feel when they are sad or hurt or ignored, as well as when they experience great joys. We can use stories, anecdotes, and classroom events to help us nurture sensitivity to how our actions impact others.

Ethical Development

Questions of fairness, cooperation, and sharing are among the first moral issues we encounter in our ethical development as human beings. Ethical education is ongoing implicitly and explicitly in what is called the “hidden curriculum” that we experience through the media, the family, and the community. Ethics can be taught through discussion, role-playing, storytelling, and other activities that improve analysis and decision-making regarding what’s good and bad, right and wrong.

Global Awareness

We live in a world that is rich in cultural, social, and individual diversity, a world where interdependence is increasing rapidly so that events anywhere are more likely to have consequences everywhere. Much can be done to prepare the next generation for accepting the responsibility of global citizenship. Understanding can be gained regarding the many communities in which we live through history, anthropology, and biology. A linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity are present in the classroom and provide lessons of diversity and commonality. We help others reach understanding about the interconnectedness of the welfare of all humanity.

Humility

We must always remember that there’s a lot we don’t know about the universe. There’s still so very much to learn. Science will help us. But sometimes scientists discover surprising things that tell us how some of our old beliefs are false. So we need to be willing to change when our knowledge changes. A good humanist doesn’t try to be sure of things that science can’t show are true.

Peace and Social Justice

A curriculum that values and fosters peace education would promote the human rights of all people and understanding among all nations, cultural and religious groups. Students should have opportunities to learn about the United Nations’ role in preventing conflict as well as efforts to achieve social justice in the United States. They should learn about problems of injustice including what can be done to prevent and respond to these problems with meaningful actions that promote peace and social justice and that protect the inherent human rights of everyone both at home and abroad.

Responsibility

Our behavior is morally responsible when we tell the truth, help someone in trouble, and live up to promises we’ve made. Our behavior is legally responsible when we obey a just law and meet the requirements of membership or citizenship. But we also have a larger responsibility to be a caring member of our family, our community, and our world. Stories and role-playing can help students understand responsibility and its absence or failure. We learn from answering such questions as: What happens when we live in accordance with fair and just rules? What happens when we don’t? What happens when the rules are unjust?

Service and Participation

Life’s fulfillment can emerge from an individual’s participation in the service of humane
ideals. School-based service-learning combines community service objectives and learning objectives with the intent that the activities change both the recipient and the provider. It provides students with the ability to identify important issues in real-life situations. Through these efforts we learn that each of us can help meet the needs of others and of ourselves. Through our lifetime, we learn over and over again of our mutual dependence.

ooOOoo

My mother was an atheist and, consequently, I have been an atheist all my life. With the above values, as they are taught in schools, there is no need for a God.

Perfect poetry

Bela provides another stunning poem.

Bela places a beautiful photograph at the end of her poem. I am going to place it at the start.

Rio Grande at Abiquiu ~ bj 2022

A Bend in the River

 ~ BELA JOHNSON

The river winds, twists,
folds back onto itself —
or so it seems.

The current moves
one way.
Appearances deceive.

From above, the loop
looks like return.
Up close, it is
only a means
to move through
the landscape
as it must.

Ripples, eddies,
the low hum beneath —
all of it movement.

When I was younger
I wanted rapids,
white churn,
the reckless drop
into whatever came.

And once it dropped
I did not care
which fork opened.
Adventure for its own sake.
I mistook intensity
for aliveness.
The current felt like enough.

I mistook velocity
for direction.
Only later did I learn
the choosing was mine.

Others named the banks.
Called it grace.
Called it destiny.

But the river was never theirs
to direct.

It kept its own counsel.
I watched for years.

Until I understood:
no god could ford it for me.
No faith could walk
that valley in my stead.

The bend only appears
to return.

It does not.

It deepens,
and goes on —
beyond the bend,
beyond the frame.

Our human need to matter

Our survival isn’t enough.

I make no apologies for providing little of my own words and just going straight to this video and the accompanying text.

ooOOoo

What if the deepest human drive isn’t happiness, survival, or even love, but the need to matter?

Philosopher and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins Michael Shermer to discuss The Mattering Instinct, her argument that the desire to feel significant lies at the core of human behavior. That drive helps explain our greatest achievements, from creativity and moral courage to scientific and artistic excellence. It also helps explain some of our darkest outcomes, including extremism, violence, and ideological fanaticism.

Goldstein examines why people will give up comfort, status, and sometimes even their own lives to feel that they matter. She questions why meaning cannot be captured by happiness metrics or self-help formulas, and why the same psychological force can produce saints, scientists, athletes, cult leaders, and terrorists. The conversation moves through free will, entropy, morality without God, fame, narcissism, and the crucial difference between ways of mattering that create order and those that leave damage behind.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.

ooOOoo

So, please watch this video!

Rebecca Stott

Speaks on BBC Radio 4 this week.

Let me offer you Rebecca Stott’s website.

Now I am going to republish that site because it is the only way I can think of to spread the word more widely.

ooOOoo

Rebecca also writes for radio. She has been a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio Four over the years.

Her radio essay ‘Reflections on My Mother’s Kenwood Mixer’, a homage to her mother’s gritty resilience in times of trouble, promoted scores of people on Twitter and Facebook to share stories about Kenwoods and their own steely mothers. Her essay ‘On Waiting’, tells the story of being marooned with her daughters at dusk in a bus-stop in remote Norfolk during a Covid lockdown. Her essay ‘House Clearing’ tells the story of the strangeness of dismantling her mother’s house after she had moved into a carehome. And her final essay for the programme, ‘On Migration’, describes an astonishing ten days in which hundreds of wild geese flew across the skies of her home town, as well the story of the great philosopher Aristotle study of migrating birds whilst himself a migrant in flight for his life on the island of Lesbos.

You’ll find a link to Rebecca’s Private Passions episode here too. A kind of Desert Island Discs without the Desert Island…. and with the extraordinary composer Michael Berkeley in the interview seat.

Also here is her five-part series commissioned by Radio Four in 2025 called Beautiful Strangeness. You can find the link below.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fv7z/episodes/player

ooOOoo

Being the age I am, Rebecca’s Beautiful Strangeness programmes spoke to me in a way that I find difficult to put into words but nonetheless the series did.

Perfect!

More about Jane Goodall

An article published by The Conversation is offered today.

ooOOoo

Jane Goodall, the gentle disrupter whose research on chimpanzees redefined what it meant to be human

Jane Goodall appears on stage at 92NY in New York on Oct. 1, 2023.
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Mireya Mayor, Florida International University

Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.

Goodall’s life journey stretches from marveling at the somewhat unremarkable creatures – though she would never call them that – in her English backyard as a wide-eyed little girl in the 1930s to challenging the very definition of what it means to be human through her research on chimpanzees in Tanzania. From there, she went on to become a global icon and a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Until her death on Oct. 1, 2025 at age 91, Goodall retained a charm, open-mindedness, optimism and wide-eyed wonder that are more typical of children. I know this because I have been fortunate to spend time with her and to share insights from my own scientific career. To the public, she was a world-renowned scientist and icon. To me, she was Jane – my inspiring mentor and friend.

Despite the massive changes Goodall wrought in the world of science, upending the study of animal behavior, she was always cheerful, encouraging and inspiring. I think of her as a gentle disrupter. One of her greatest gifts was her ability to make everyone, at any age, feel that they have the power to change the world. https://www.youtube.com/embed/rcL4jnGTL1U?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jane Goodall documented that chimpanzees not only used tools but make them – an insight that altered thinking about animals and humans.

Discovering tool use in animals

In her pioneering studies in the lush rainforest of Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Game Reserve, now a national park, Goodall noted that the most successful chimp leaders were gentle, caring and familial. Males that tried to rule by asserting their dominance through violence, tyranny and threat did not last.

I also am a primatologist, and Goodall’s groundbreaking observations of chimpanzees at Gombe were part of my preliminary studies. She famously recorded chimps taking long pieces of grass and inserting them into termite nests to “fish” for the insects to eat, something no one else had previously observed.

It was the first time an animal had been seen using a tool, a discovery that altered how scientists differentiated between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey chose Goodall to do this work precisely because she was not formally trained. When she turned up in Leakey’s office in Tanzania in 1957, at age 23, Leakey initially hired her as his secretary, but he soon spotted her potential and encouraged her to study chimpanzees. Leakey wanted someone with a completely open mind, something he believed most scientists lost over the course of their formal training.

Because chimps are humans’ closest living relatives, Leakey hoped that understanding the animals would provide insights into early humans. In a predominantly male field, he also thought a woman would be more patient and insightful than a male observer. He wasn’t wrong.

Six months in, when Goodall wrote up her observations of chimps using tools, Leakey wrote, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Goodall spoke of animals as having emotions and cultures, and in the case of chimps, communities that were almost tribal. She also named the chimps she observed, an unheard-of practice at the time, garnering ridicule from scientists who had traditionally numbered their research subjects.

One of her most remarkable observations became known as the Gombe Chimp War. It was a four-year-long conflict in which eight adult males from one community killed all six males of another community, taking over their territory, only to lose it to another, bigger community with even more males.

Confidence in her path

Goodall was persuasive, powerful and determined, and she often advised me not to succumb to people’s criticisms. Her path to groundbreaking discoveries did not involve stepping on people or elbowing competitors aside.

Rather, her journey to Africa was motivated by her wonder, her love of animals and a powerful imagination. As a little girl, she was entranced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 story “Tarzan of the Apes,” and she loved to joke that Tarzan married the wrong Jane.

When I was a 23-year-old former NFL cheerleader, with no scientific background at that time, and looked at Goodall’s work, I imagined that I, too, could be like her. In large part because of her, I became a primatologist, co-discovered a new species of lemur in Madagascar and have had an amazing life and career, in science and on TV, as a National Geographic explorer.
When it came time to write my own story, I asked Goodall to contribute the introduction. She wrote:

“Mireya Mayor reminds me a little of myself. Like me she loved being with animals when she was a child. And like me she followed her dream until it became a reality.”

In a 2023 interview, Jane Goodall answers TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s questions about chimpanzee behavior.

Storyteller and teacher

Goodall was an incredible storyteller and saw it as the most successful way to help people understand the true nature of animals. With compelling imagery, she shared extraordinary stories about the intelligence of animals, from apes and dolphins to rats and birds, and, of course, the octopus. She inspired me to become a wildlife correspondent for National Geographic so that I could share the stories and plights of endangered animals around the world.

Goodall inspired and advised world leaders, celebrities, scientists and conservationists. She also touched the lives of millions of children.

Two women face each other, smiling and holding a book
Jane Goodall and primatologist Mireya Mayor with Mayor’s book ‘Just Wild Enough,’ a memoir aimed at young readers. Mireya Mayor, CC BY-ND

Through the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to engage people around the world in conservation, she launched Roots & Shoots, a global youth program that operates in more than 60 countries. The program teaches children about connections between people, animals and the environment, and ways to engage locally to help all three.

Along with Goodall’s warmth, friendship and wonderful stories, I treasure this comment from her: “The greatest danger to our future is our apathy. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.”

It’s a radical notion from a one-of-a-kind scientist.

This article has been updated to add the date of Goodall’s death.

Mireya Mayor, Director of Exploration and Science Communication, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

That comment by Jane that was treasured by Mireya is so important. “The greatest danger to our future is our apathy. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.”

A brilliant programme

I’m speaking of a series on BBC Radio 4.

The series is called Naturebang: “Becky Ripley and Emily Knight make sense of what it means to be human by looking to the natural world… Science meets storytelling with a philosophical twist.“

The website is: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00060x0

There are 35 episodes. I particularly liked the episode broadcast yesterday about the Clams.

“How do we extract the maximum amount of power from the sun? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight enlist the help of a giant, thousand-year old clam. And end up in the depths of space…

Featuring Professor Alison Sweeney at Yale University, and Mike Garrett from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

Produced and presented by Emily Knight and Becky Ripley“

Amazing!

Re Curtis Yarvin

Maybe democracy is not correct?

Last Sunday morning I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme The Dark Enlightenment. Here is a summary from the BBC website:

A radical political philosophy founded by a software engineer called Curtis Yarvin is gaining in influence, and said to be shaping Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

It is on BBC Sounds. Here is the link: BBC Currently.

Now the post submitted by The Conversation.

ooOOoo

Friday essay: Trump’s reign fits Curtis Yarvin’s blueprint of a CEO-led American monarchy. What is technological fascism?

Luke Munn, The University of Queensland

The plan was simple. It started by retiring all government employees by offering them incentives to leave and never return. To avoid anarchy and keep authority, the police and military would be retained.

Government funds would be seized and the money redirected to more worthwhile pursuits. Court orders pushing back against these measures as “unconstitutional” should be summarily ignored. The press should be massaged and censored as necessary. Finally, universities, scientific institutions, and NGOs should also be snapped off, their funding terminated.

These moves resemble many made (or attempted) in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. But they were all laid out in 2012 by a single person: Curtis Yarvin.

In the past five years, Yarvin’s reactionary blueprints for governance have found powerful backers in both Silicon Valley and Washington circles.

His ideas have been taken up and repeated in various ways by Peter Thiel (PayPal), Elon Musk (X, Tesla), Alexander Karp (Palantir) and other founders, CEOs and thought-leaders within the broader tech industry. He was a guest at Trump’s Coronation Ball in January.

Perhaps most directly, vice president JD Vance has praised him by name and echoed his ideas, asserting the need for a “de-wokification programme” that “strikes at the heart of the beast”.

Yarvin’s current newsletter, Grey Room, now boasts 57,000 subscribers. “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe,” cautioned a recent article, “Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.”

JD Vance has praised Yarvin by name and echoed his ideas, calling for a ‘de-wokification programme’. Bonnie Cash/Pool/AAP

Rebooting the state

Yarvin, a 51-year old computer engineer, has been publishing his thoughts on politics for close to 20 years. His original blog, launched in 2007, introduced his potent blend of “the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought”. Last week, The Washington Post called it “required reading for the extremely online right”.

Democracy was dead and doomed from the beginning, Yarvin argued in his blog, in quippy, Reddit-style prose. Governance should look to other mechanisms (tech) and modes (monarchism) for inspiration.

The state needs a “hard reboot,” asserted Yarvin. “Democratic elections are entirely superfluous to the mechanism of government” he argued. “A vote for democratic or republican matters a little bit,” he admitted, but “basically if the whole electoral system disappeared, Washington would go on running in exactly the same ways”.

Curtis Yarvin. Wikipedia

For Yarvin, then, it is not just the government that must change – a superficial swap of parties and politicians – but something far more fundamental: the form of government. Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver. The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.

While elements (like the term “red pill”) travelled far beyond its pages, Yarvin’s ideas remained on the fringes until recently, with their growing popularity pushing him into the limelight. Last week he hit the headlines due to his debate at Harvard, a place that has become a “symbol of resistance to Trump”, with political theorist Danielle Allen, a democracy advocate.

Allen, who debated Yarvin to provide students with “help thinking about intellectual material”, wrote after the debate that he correctly diagnoses a problem, but not its causes or solutions:

He is right that our political institutions are failing. He is also right that their members have failed to see the depth of our governance problems and their own contributions to them through technocracy and political correctness. […] But Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing.

A technological republic

For Yarvin and others like him, democracy’s fatal flaw is the demos (or, people) itself. Trusting the agency and ability of citizens to govern through representation is naive, Yarvin believes. Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir, a firm that provides military and intelligence agencies with big data “intelligence”, agrees.

“Why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy?” Karp asked in his recent bestseller, The Technological Republic.

For Yarvin, Karp, Thiel and the other elites that embrace these ideas, the people are idiots. A favourite quote (likely apocryphal) is from Churchill, stating the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

If a legacy republic was one by the people and for the people, Karp argues a technological republic will “require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government”.

In this vision, the state shapeshifts into something sleeker, more successful, more like a startup: the corporation. “A government is just a corporation that owns a country,” Yarvin stresses. Musk has echoed this line: “the government is simply the largest corporation”.

But if this is true, it is a pathetic one, according to its hyper-capitalist detractors: bloated with waste, saddled with debt and slowed by regulation. The state is a dinosaur which makes incremental change and must tread with caution, bending to the needs of its constituents. Founders dictate their commands and impose their will.

Dark enlightenment

“Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO,” explains philosopher Nick Land.

“As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.” In this model, the president becomes the CEO king; the citizen becomes the customer or user.

Land, more than any other, has provided the philosophical cachet around this movement, taking Yarvin’s quippy but fuzzy prose and formalising it into the political and philosophical formation known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment”, with a sprawling 2014 essay that moves from the death of the west to racial terror, the limits of freedom and the next stage of human evolution.

Nick Land. GoodReads

Land, variously regarded as a cybernetic prophet or scientific racist, has long held anti-humanist and anti-democratic views. “Voice”, or representation – the key tenet of liberal democracy – has been tried and failed, Land argues. The only viable alternative is “exit”: flight from failed governance altogether, into a post-political and post-human future.

To simplify drastically: democracy’s naive belief in equality for all – propped up and policed by the array of humanitarian organisations, government agencies and woke culture warriors that Yarvin sneeringly dubs “The Cathedral” – has held capitalism back from its true potential.

Technological fascism

For Land, Yarvin and others, optimal rule would be both hypercapitalist and hyperconservative: a hybrid political order I’ve begun to research and conceptualise as technological fascism.

Technological fascism gazes to the future and past for inspiration. It couples, in the words of writer Jacob Siegel:

the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society.

In this vision, the best form of governance marries reaction and information, Machiavelli and machine learning, aristocracy and artificial intelligence, authoritarianism and technosolutionism.

To revive the glorious traditions of the past, its champions believe, we must leverage the bleeding-edge innovations of tomorrow.

Governing like a monarch

This culture is already infiltrating Washington. Trump is governing like a monarch, making unilateral decisions via hundreds of executive orders, bulldozing through opposition and legislation.

Musk and his DOGE minions stress they need to “delete entire agencies”, commandeering offices and allegedly stealing data under the pretext of eliminating “waste”.

A recent study of over 500 political scientists found “the vast majority think the US is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism”.

In the vision laid out by Yarvin – and taken up more and more by a growing political vanguard – government is either a political inconvenience or a technical problem. Increasingly, the authoritarian imperative to impose absolute rule and the Silicon Valley mantra of “moving fast and breaking stuff” dovetail into a disturbing single directive.

Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

Now if that isn’t food for thought then I do not know what is!